In mid-January, the Senate convened to consider election reform legislation. Many years had passed since the “world’s greatest deliberative body” had formally taken up the issue. The chamber spent a little over a dozen hours on the matter, almost all of which were consumed by senators delivering monologues to a mostly empty chamber. Democrats name-checked Martin Luther King, Jr. innumerable times, bombastically claimed “avalanches” and “tsunamis” of voter disenfranchisement, and called for reforming the filibuster to save democracy. Republican senators mostly dumped cold water on their colleagues’ hyperbole. There was surprisingly little discussion of the particulars of the legislation…(Read more)