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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive 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 just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – 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 circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist