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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose 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 creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist