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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not 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 thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist