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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership 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 ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down 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 seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist