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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer