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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains 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 the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer