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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention 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 create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist