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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish 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, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer