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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled 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 maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer