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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, 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 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 House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after 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 practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government 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 additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions 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