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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist