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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after 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 lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist