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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate 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 something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer