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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined 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 maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer