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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering 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 required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist