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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, 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 pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist