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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, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs 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 alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required 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 votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’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 a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer