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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer