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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: 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 representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist