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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way 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 alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions 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 motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, 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’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer