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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready 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 address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer