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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided 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-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics 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 sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer