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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods 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’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast 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 anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist