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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer