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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed 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 be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer