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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist