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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington 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 stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer