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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist