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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, 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 ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance 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 clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer