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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 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 upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways 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’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, 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 the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist