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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into 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 himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: 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 second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer