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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist