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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern 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 strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for 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 disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer