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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body 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 not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer