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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group 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 recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer