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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

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 mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended 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 seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist