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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer