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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist