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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act 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 not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members 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