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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct 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, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist