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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist