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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another 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 time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability 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 Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist