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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy 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 first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, 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 the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist