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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 turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering 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 after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist