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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument 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 worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer