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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy 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 better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors 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