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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire 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 Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations 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