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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm 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 necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist