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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 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 the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued 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 question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer