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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those 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 not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim 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 GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something 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 opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist