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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, 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 total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds 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 great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors 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 columnist