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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer