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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, 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-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist