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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal 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 issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep 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 democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington 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 stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist