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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process 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 first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer