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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial 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 shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: 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 means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members 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 writer