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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct 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.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer