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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 power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined 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 the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world 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 undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors 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