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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way 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 influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind 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 Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue 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 investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer