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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats 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 response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, 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 state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist