The Democracy Agenda

A quick look a what it might look like in 2029.

Suppose Democrats do win the presidency and Congressional majorities in 2028 – and with comfortable enough margins that they can pass a democracy agenda. What might their priorities be? Here’s a very short version of what would make sense to me.

• The top priority at this point, like it or not, has to be Supreme Court reform, because otherwise none of the others will work. The simpler the better, and the simplest solution is to expand the Court to give Democrats a 7-6 majority. And while they are at it, expand the lower courts as well, which is actually justified for normal judicial reasons, but would of course help the Democrats nominating new lower court judges – and the pro-democracy coalition – as well.

• Carve out a democracy exception to the filibuster. That’s almost certainly going to be necessary to pass any Court reform.

• And then focus on the easiest, most simple additional measures. Restore the Voting Rights Act, and expand it to make voting easier for everyone. DC Statehood, and Puerto Rico statehood if Puerto Ricans want it.¹ Restore some sanity to redistricting by, at the very least, limiting it to once a decade (on top of the rules in a restored VRA). Eliminate or fix various emergency powers that Trump has exploited. Eliminate Court-authored presidential immunity, and to enforce Constitutional prohibitions of emoluments that the courts have made dead letters. Add what can be done to restore and require independence to the Justice Department. And then probably some further measures to restore the place of Congress within the Constitutional system, including anything from more spending on the legislative branch to restoring Congress’s equal role in influencing executive branch departments and agencies.

That last paragraph leaves plenty to argue about, including which of those items to include (and what else needs to be added). But that’s the basic procedure: Change the courts so that they are once again open to democracy. Change Senate procedure so that the democracy agenda can pass. And then focus on what can be done by legislation that can pass.

Not in that agenda? Fundamental changes to the US system. In some cases, such as further Supreme Court reforms, that’s because it would require a Constitutional amendment and those are just very hard to do. In other cases, Congressional passage would be difficult. Take the popular reformer preference for switching the House to multi-member districts elected by proportional representation. Putting aside whether it’s a better system overall, it would strike a lot of people whose support would be important as weird and different, rather than restoring and strengthening the republic. Even if that can be overcome, it would create winners and losers within the House Democratic caucus, which makes it a lot harder to pass than, say, DC statehood. The same is probably true of full filibuster elimination.²

And look: I expect Republicans to oppose all of this. But in the unlikely event that the party fractures and a significant portion of them are willing to cut a deal, then, yes, it’s worth compromising on almost everything.³

With one exception. Right now, there’s just about nothing Congress could do to prop up healthy democracy in the US (or, for that matter, to pass any other policy agenda the Democrats might have) that is safe from the six Republicans on the Supreme Court. There’s simply no way to Court-proof anything.⁴

Is all of this realistic? I think, if anything, it’s pretty moderate, even though it would still be a heavy lift. A lot of it other than court reform was in the agenda the Democrats failed to pass in 2021-2022, when they had only 50 Senators and a narrow House majority. Quite a bit of it is restoring the status quo ante or building on it.

It helps that this time, the democracy agenda is almost certainly the top unfinished topic from the last Democratic unified government, just as climate was in 2021 and health care was in 2009. Even so, it would probably require comfortable majorities in both chambers along with a president who made it a priority.

And, as with health care in 2009, all of this gets easier if Democrats come to something like a consensus during the presidential nomination process. In other words? The time to start working on this is now.

1. Statehood for the District is not only the right thing to do regardless because the people who live there are US citizens, but it also chips away at the anti-urban bias in the Senate.

2. The filibuster doesn’t have long to live, given how many holes both parties have poked in it, and the full 60-vote Senate was never a stable situation to begin with. But it’s still probably easier to punch a new hole for democracy. And easy is good.

3. Just to be clear: I’m not talking about dropping half the agenda in order to bring in two or three of the least conservative Republicans. Significant compromise is only worth it for Democrats who had the option of a partisan bill if it really comes close to splitting the GOP in half.

4. They don’t always vote with Republicans! But they do often enough, with little enough justification, that nothing is safe. Solving the court problem is essential. But note that even leaves room for compromise. New Justices can be young partisans, or they can be older, bipartisan democracy supporters — yes, there are Republican current and former judges, nominated by Republican presidents, who strongly disagree with many of the more partisan and anti-democratic decisions of the Roberts court.