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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing 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 significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle 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