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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party 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 belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry 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 California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer