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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer