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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

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 approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched 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 era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist