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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money 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 perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer