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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs 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 U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 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 in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ 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 redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – 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 elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations 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 writer