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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power 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 institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer