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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term 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 redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer