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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members 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 writer