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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist