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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps 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 party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer