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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – 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 government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer