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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation 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 emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. 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 maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer