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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. 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 Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change 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 other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to 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 significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist