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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering 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 resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district 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 truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer