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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse 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 ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs 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 irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: 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 independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize 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 first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer