I’ve become something of a broken record on this. But repetition sometimes serves a critical purpose. Supreme Court reform is now the sine qua non of any reformist program in the United States, any program to re-implant/re-secure civic democracy in the United States. Filibuster reform, abolition of the filibuster, is comparably important. In fact, the two are interwoven with each other in such a way as to be almost indistinguishably joined together.

But a lot of people know the filibuster has to go. Reforming the Supreme Court, which involves one of several ways of breaking the power of the six corrupt Republican appointees, is a much harder lift. It’s not a harder lift in voting terms. It can be done by passing an ordinary law (once you’ve done away with the filibuster) and having a president to sign it. But for many in the political class, for many elected officials, it remains unthinkable. On the plus side, Democratic voters and opinion leaders have some time to lay the groundwork. The soonest anything can happen is January 2029. (You need Congress and the White House.) But there’s a huge amount of work to do. Because my sense is that Democratic officeholders, party elites, aren’t even close to being there. And there’s really no future without it.

Kate goes deeper on the new definition of “eve” the Court promulgated to help Republicans hold the House next year. (I don’t think it’ll be enough, but that’s another matter.) They take a principle that has some logic in extreme cases: there needs to be some balance between the merits of a case and potential disruption to an election. But given that we have House elections every two years, one year out cannot be the “eve” of an election. In any case, it’s more evidence of what we already know: we’re dealing with a corrupt Court at war with the Constitution. They do what they need to do to get the result they want. Read Kate.