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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle 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 ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined 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 mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’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 investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist