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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; 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 noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist