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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle 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 fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer