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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist