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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still 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 the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist