Golden is the author of "Unlock Congress" and a senior fellow at the Adlai Stevenson Center on Democracy, which seeks to improve democracy on a global scale. He is also a member of The Fulcrum's advisory board.
It may seem like recent Supreme Court decisions have the conclusive power to halt reform efforts to unrig congressional districts and suck the billions of dollars out of our politics. But this is really not the case. A path remains for Democratic leaders to restore fairness and common sense to American elections. But in order to do it, they'll need to rip a page out of Mitch McConnell's book and restore majority rule to the Senate.
The fact is that millions of Americans of different political stripes crave electoral reforms that would make the House more accurately reflect voter preferences and would slash the corruptive influence of big money on Capitol Hill.
A bipartisan poll conducted by GOP pollster Ashlee Lee Stephenson and Democratic pollster Celinda Lake revealed that 71 percent of Americans wanted the Supreme Court to set a clear standard at which point political gerrymandering violates the Constitution. And 73 percent said they wanted districts to be drawn in a nonpartisan fashion — even if the party they affiliate with would win fewer seats.
Similarly, an overwhelming majority of Americans are sick of the slosh of campaign cash that, according to researchers Martin Gilens and Ben Page, makes the preferences of wealthiest contributors (the richest 10 percent of Americans) 15 times more likely to become policy than what the rest of us want.
People get this. In 2018, Pew Research reported that 77 percent of Americans agree "there should be limits on the amount of money individuals and groups can spend on campaigns."
So why am I training the spotlight on the Democrats? Because as much as everyday Americans from both parties say they want new laws to shatter the corruption, the fact is that the support from actual lawmakers falls heavily along partisan lines. There is no hiding from this reality.
In 2016, Democratic minority leaders in the House and Senate announced a practical set of reforms to put more power back into the hands of the people. The legislation would have mandated independent, nonpartisan districting commissions, provided federal matching funds to leverage small donations to candidates, and restored essential protections of the Voting Rights Act.
The GOP dismissed it out of hand.
But in 2018, a new Democratic House majority quickly passed these reforms in its first major bill, HR 1 — the For the People Act. The bill would also fight "dark money" by requiring disclosures of donors from big-money organizations, expand the curbs on contributions from foreign nationals and create a national strategy to protect our elections.
The bill passed, on a 234-193 vote. All 234 "yeas" were Democrats. Not a single vote crossed over in either direction.
It should come as no surprise that the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, has refused to put the bill on the floor. Even if he did, the Democrats would be hard-pressed to get four Republicans to cross lines to reach 51 votes.
But reaching a majority in the Senate isn't the bar anyway. The "cloture" rule requires getting 60 votes before any bill can be debated and voted upon. That, for Democrats in the minority, is a near impossibility.
That said, nothing is forever. The Democrats have a chance to win back the Senate and the White House in 16 months. If they do, under the current rules, it would still be a steep climb to reach that 60-vote threshold on HR 1. But here's the thing: They don't have to.
The filibuster and cloture rules are nowhere to be found in the U.S. Constitution. They were an accident of history.
In 2013, Democrat Harry Reid, then the Senate majority leader, went "nuclear" and dropped the 60-vote rule down to a simple majority for confirmations on lower federal court judges and all executive branch nominations.
It was a bold move, but not even in the same league as Mitch McConnell.
In 2016, McConnell refused for nine months to have hearings for President Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. But as soon as McConnell had a Republican in the Oval Office, he exploded the filibuster and confirmed two lifetime appointments to the high court by majority rule. This achievement will appear in the first paragraph of McConnell's obituary.
Only one circumstance remains where the filibuster and cloture rules in the Senate can stymie the efforts of the majority: passing legislation.
Some Democrats will object to losing this blocking tool in the Senate — pointing out that due to demographic and regional splits, by 2040 an estimated 70 percent of our population will be in 15 states, represented by 30 senators.
It's a legitimate concern. But it should not stop Democrats when they get back up to bat. The 60-vote rule is merely a custom which arguably violates Article I of the Constitution. Just as these rules were overturned for nominations, they will eventually be eliminated for legislation. It is more a matter of when — and for what.
A few of the Democratic presidential candidates have already said they'd be open to jettisoning the filibuster — but most are wary.
So far, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been most unequivocal, announcing on April 5:
"When Democrats next have power, we should be bold and clear: We're done with two sets of rules — one for the Republicans and one for the Democrats. ... If Mitch McConnell tries to do what he did to President Obama, and puts small-minded partisanship ahead of solving the massive problems facing this country, then we should get rid of the filibuster."
Reform activists should be pushing every one of these Democratic presidential candidates to make this same commitment. Now. Get them all on the record.
The true ideals that are driving a movement to repair a rigged American government are nonpartisan. But it just might take the will of a single political party to reform the rules — in order to restore the system.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.