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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: 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 critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different 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 Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. 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 fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist