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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, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington 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 politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer