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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could 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 seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack 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 shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause 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 the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer