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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown 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 indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new 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 power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist