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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people 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 presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle 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 practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist