Democrats ignoring the best advice

Weeks before the 2020 election, a secret 87-page document [titled Plan D] outlined in matter-of-fact language the threat posed by Donald Trump’s still-to-come campaign of election denial.

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The document is an artifact from a dangerous time: Warning that Trump would surely not concede defeat to Joe Biden, it advised Trump’s opponents to “assume the worst” would follow. It urged them to gird for a struggle not only with the president but with “institutions controlled or influenced by the GOP, including the courts.” The document forecast “militia and white supremacist activities through the inauguration — and, very likely, accelerated activity in the early months of a Biden administration.”

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“A Biden win will not prove that our democracy is healthy,” the document argued, continuing: “Win, lose, or draw, we should perceive ourselves not in a singular moment of crisis but rather in what may be an era of existential challenge for American democracy.”

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Back then, the group behind Plan D saw deep reform to the political system as a survival imperative for Democrats. If the party controlled government after 2020, the report said, Democrats must treat it as a “fleeting-once-in-a-generation (or perhaps lifetime) opportunity” to revise the political system. Among the targets of that proposed overhaul: a Senate biased toward rural red states, a Supreme Court stacked with right-wing appointees and an Electoral College that overruled the popular vote twice in two decades.

“First and foremost, we must rewrite the rules of our democracy. That’s doing much more than just the voting, corruption, and money-in-politics reforms in HR1 or the VRA renewal,” the document stated, referring to the centerpiece legislative offerings of the Democrats’ pro-democracy agenda. “We must commit to structural reforms that, at a minimum, include DC and Puerto Rico statehood and expanding the federal courts.”

Liberals must also “embrace more aspirational goals of ending the Electoral College and establishing a constitutional right to vote,” it continued, plus more basic aims like the elimination of the Senate filibuster.

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Democrats captured the White House and Congress, but with legislative majorities so small that they could not even restore the Voting Rights Act, let alone add new Supreme Court justices, new states and new stars to the American flag.

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But these days Democrats are not really promoting ideas to address the most distorted features of the American system. [...] A short-lived flirtation with court-packing withered in a blue-ribbon presidential commission that issued an equivocal report.

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Indeed, there are times when talking to Democratic leaders about threats to democracy can feel a little like consulting with a physician who speaks with eager authority about all manner of unpleasant illnesses — except the terminal disease you have actually contracted.

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“In this country, we had a history of fixing flawed elements of our democracy, generation by generation, from slavery in the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution, to women’s suffrage, to changing the age to vote to 18,” [Plan D's Arkadi] Gerney said. “And that process, in the last 50 years, has gotten stuck.”

Part of the problem, he said, is that America’s most unfair political institutions are self-perpetuating. You cannot do much to change the Senate and the Supreme Court without the assent of the Senate and the Supreme Court.

Still, Gerney insisted, awfully difficult is not the same thing as impossible.

  Politico

Impossible if you don't even try.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.