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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 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 the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation 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, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful 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 necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer