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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down 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 rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates 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