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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 power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans 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 Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer