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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist