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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional 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 actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist