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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created 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 truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer