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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer