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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, 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 difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist