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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense 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 Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer