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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed 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 rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s 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 more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist