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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more 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 across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer