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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, 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 control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue 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 eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer