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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors 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 columnist