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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum 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 political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided 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 measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term 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 years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist