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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures 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 perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after 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 legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members 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