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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power 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.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP 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. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn 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 the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress 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 made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist