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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system 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 first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power 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 something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist