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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer