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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to 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 California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different 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, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer