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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become 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 power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, 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 question of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’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 political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: 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 impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide 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 the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer