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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections 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 little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 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 special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once 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 lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer