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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force 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