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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic 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 declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force 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