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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help 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 Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer