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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; 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 actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist