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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, 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 disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer