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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication 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 Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able 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 once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer