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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions 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 guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist