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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 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 in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer