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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say 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 actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist