The Atlantic
Democrats Need to Choose a Path on Voting Rights
The people who need to mend their ways are not the supposedly complacent Democrats of the center—but the overambitious faction of the activist left.
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Megan Varner / Getty
Where Republicans control local power, they are building a new infrastructure of minority rule. They are gerrymandering districts, raising barriers to voting, biasing election administration, and politicizing election certification. There is nothing secret about this effort; everybody can see it happening.
Yet the members of the threatened, narrow Democratic majorities in Congress—the people who might seem to have the strongest motives to act—seem too paralyzed to respond. The 118th Congress has expended nearly a quarter of its term. It has enacted one huge spending bill already and seems poised to enact another. The Democratic majorities have flexed muscle—and are attempting to jam through a commission to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol over the opposition of Republican leadership.