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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan 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 California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds 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 great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel 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