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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved 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 developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist