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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation 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 people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer