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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those 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 citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed 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 dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures 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 revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle 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 writer