I’ve seen a few comments over the last couple days to the effect that our system turned out to be more robust, stronger than some of us feared. Trump tried to tamper with and rig the 2026 election. But he mostly failed. I would put it a little differently. We turned out to be — the American people — stronger, more robust than many of us feared. This may seem mawkish or merely semantic. But it’s more than that and the difference speaks directly to the current debates about accountability and how it should shape the next Congress and the next two years.
The singular lesson of the Trump Era has been that no system can be stronger than its participants’ willingness to follow and enforce the rules that govern it. It’s worth sitting with that for a moment. No constitution or system of laws and protections can be stronger than its participants’ willingness to follow the rules that govern it. Trump was faced with the big challenge that states control the administration of elections. But the White House came up with numerous quite ingenious angles to overcome those obstacles. It took an immense amount of work by voters, elected officials, judges, lawyers, countless Americans in myriad positions and professions to stop it. A governmental system provides a framework, a playing field. But as the authors of the federal Constitution debated and largely decided: there is no machine that runs of itself. It lives or dies, degenerates or perseveres, based on the people, the citizens who make it up.
I’ve also seen the press asking Democrats why they’re going to focus on “payback” and cases where those questions have been handled in clumsy ways. Mostly, though, I’ve been struck by how many high profile Democrats have been right out of the gate with messages focused on accountability as a central focus of the next Congress. The best way to answer these questions is to say the obvious. It’s not “payback.” It’s accountability. It’s enforcing the law. But when we move past rhetoric to what we are actually doing: we are preserving our system by enforcing its rules. There’s a lot of debate right now about what reforms can prevent another descent into lawlessness and autocracy. It is inherently difficult to bind the future. There are ways, laws and reforms. We can discuss those in different posts. But the surest way to bind the future, to guard and defend a system of laws and liberties, is to enforce that system’s rules. Preserving and strengthening the tethers that connect rule-breaking to accountability, making them as close as possible to the confident regularity of day following night, is the surest way for our actions today to keep a hold over the future.
