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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no 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 complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force 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