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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer