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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term 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 objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer