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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far 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 the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer