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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome 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 power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic 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 reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer