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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more 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 liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats 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 Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion 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 worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist