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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created 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 representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: 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 substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much 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 mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution 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 not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist