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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist