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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist