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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after 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 fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist