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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial 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 just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer