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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication 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 U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle 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 strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures 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 sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. 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 does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer