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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 initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens 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 keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 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 voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able 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. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer