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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer