There is a habit worth naming in modern politics. Those who claim to champion self-governance are often the first to reject one of its most basic rules. When you lose an election, you do not get to dictate policy.
Since Cleisthenes established the first democracy in Athens in 506 BC, majority rule has carried an inherent risk. Left unchecked, it can collapse into mob rule. The Framers of the United States Constitution took that lesson seriously. Their answer was a Constitutional Republic, where majority rule is constrained by minority rights, and no election result can strip citizens of their rights. The difference between Athens and Philadelphia was not a rejection of democracy but its refinement.
In such a system, elections have consequences. When individuals or parties find themselves in the minority, even within their own ranks, the appropriate response is persuasion. The abolitionist movement labored for decades before achieving majority consensus. The labor movement lost repeatedly before it won. That slow and frustrating process is central to democratic legitimacy precisely because it requires broad agreement rather than procedural shortcuts.
Problems arise when political actors attempt to bypass this process entirely. Last fall, Senate Democrats blocked a continuing resolution to keep the government funded, attaching a list of policy demands as the price of their cooperation. The resulting shutdown lasted 43 days, the longest in American history, and produced furloughed federal workers, delayed economic data, and real costs to GDP.
Republicans have their own version of this habit. Rather than negotiate across the aisle, congressional Republicans have relied on the budget reconciliation process to bypass the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, engineering accounting workarounds to pass major legislation on party-line votes. Both approaches reflect the same instinct. When you cannot build a majority, change the rules of the game.
The judiciary reveals a similar tension. Courts are tasked with interpreting the law and upholding the Constitution, a role established by Marbury v. Madison and essential to the Framers’ design. When either party perceives the courts as obstacles rather than referees, the temptation is to restructure them rather than persuade the public. Democrats floated proposals to expand the Supreme Court from nine to thirteen justices when its rulings went against them. The impulse is understandable. The precedent it would set is corrosive.
A healthy constitutional system resolves policy disagreements primarily through the legislative process, with courts intervening only when constitutional questions are genuinely at stake. That system depends on all parties accepting its constraints, including the constraint of losing.
The alternative is a ratchet with no off switch.
Every majority that cannot get what it wants through persuasion reaches for a procedural lever, and every minority that reaches back weakens the architecture that makes peaceful self-governance possible at all.
