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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body 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 additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates 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