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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer