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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication 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 Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer