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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer