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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish 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 most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer