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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer