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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer