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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance 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 California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves 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 alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist