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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle 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