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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge 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 simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome 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 deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective 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 undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer