Republicans have spent decades rewriting the rules, then breaking the rules they rewrote, then declaring that those were the rules all along. Now an extremist Supreme Court put into place by that ruthless process is gutting the Constitution and the nation’s future, and Democrats … are debating whether to do anything about it.
The White House is defending President Joe Biden’s limited response to the end of Roe v. Wade’s national abortion rights guarantee by pointing out that executive power is limited here. That’s true—and yet we got here because Republicans have not worried nearly as much about what they can’t do. And without concrete solutions on offer—even if those solutions are steps in a years-long fight to claw back to where we were in 2016, as inadequate as that was—how do Democratic leaders like Biden imagine they will inspire voters to turn out in November to move us a step or two toward the goal?
There may not be a cheat code here, but the way to mobilize people is to give them hope, to let them know you’re in the fight with them and looking for answers, from the limited but specific to the unorthodox. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren said to John Delaney in a 2019 Democratic presidential primary debate, “You know, I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for. I don’t get it.”
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