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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: 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 actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still 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 the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist