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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue 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 era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist