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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent 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 years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – 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 required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors 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