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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch 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 thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time 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 representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer