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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries 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 political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, 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 Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions 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 the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct 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