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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. 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 unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics 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 become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist