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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: 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 objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer