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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, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration 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 in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say 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 GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer