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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument 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 taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer