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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended 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’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. 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 Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer