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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct 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 the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington 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 stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure 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 hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer