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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist