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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument 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 worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense 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 in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist