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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring 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 simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn 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 genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital 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 era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates 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 news outlet columnist