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.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.