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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect 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, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

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 voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer