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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal 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 question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer