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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’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 move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics 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 find themselves 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 testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist