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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist