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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer