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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear 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, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist