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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: 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, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress 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 authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel 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 columnist