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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel 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 columnist