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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective 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 behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist