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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

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

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle 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 writer