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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions 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 Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer