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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans 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 the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic 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 genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer