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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – 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 manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer