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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic 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 redraw boundaries that secure 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, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force 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