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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending 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 government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide 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 liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer