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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology 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 power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist