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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer