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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer