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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist