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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats 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 trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer