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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 tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer