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What, precisely, 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, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics 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 truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic 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 motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise 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 conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer