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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount 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. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist