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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after 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 lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer