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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, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions 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 across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer