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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; 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 power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’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 actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer