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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split 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 intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not 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 procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist