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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional 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 electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good 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 rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer