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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct 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 writer