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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, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. 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 humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond 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 without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs 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 own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part 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 significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist