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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence 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 confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist