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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist