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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, 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 management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

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

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps 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 years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire 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 reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer