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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process 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 argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era 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 new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer