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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. 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 Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act 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 not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer