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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of 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 upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist