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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, 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 legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer