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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

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 upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended 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 additional five seats 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. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist