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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist