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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. 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 become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

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 embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer