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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer