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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw 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 similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire 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 the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. 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 the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist