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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give 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 also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force 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 writer