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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer