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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. 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 for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer