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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control 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 as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state 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 budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle 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