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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic 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 revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer