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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist