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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: 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 representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist