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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist