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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal 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 required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer