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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, 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 conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer