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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’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 special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer