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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics 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 design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions 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 motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist