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What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; 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 administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’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 political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer