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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend 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. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer