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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer