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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed 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 question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able 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. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power 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 the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist