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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist