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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system 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 alter their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct 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