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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s 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 retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, 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 continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist