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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication 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 somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures 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 retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist