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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed 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; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much 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 lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force 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