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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 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 upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, 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 clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist