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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, 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 manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates 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