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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional 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 belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to check 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’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say 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 GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist