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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer