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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm 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 once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist