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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential 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 ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term 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-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue 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 era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer