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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 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 nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country 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, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer