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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist