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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

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 special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level 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 fight 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 legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist