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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee 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 tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer