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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away 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 also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, 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 more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist