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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning 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 first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer