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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist