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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on 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 institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’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 ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer