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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

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, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern 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 more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates 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 columnist