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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided 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 clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, 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 deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors 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