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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic 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 investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer