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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 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 in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize 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 first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer