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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist