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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure 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 other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist