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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s 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 likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens 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 districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer