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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control 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 too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens 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 respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled 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 GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, 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