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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away 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 also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist