The VRA was the nice version. The version that said: here’s a door, it’s open, your voice has weight, use it. They’ve closed the door. They closed it on purpose, knowing exactly what they were doing, because the people behind it had started to win.

The question for any Democrat running for anything in the next four years isn’t whether you oppose what the Court has done. Of course you do. The question is whether you understand what it means: what it broke, what it’ll cost, what you’re willing to do to hold this country together while there’s still a country to hold.

The answer is not a better legal brief. It’s not another press release of outrage, though outrage is correct. The answer is the nerve to use every lever the system still gives us, and the discipline to say out loud what we’re using them for. Not to win the next cycle. To rebuild the conditions in which participation isn’t a sucker’s bet. To restore the bargain before the people we’ve asked to keep faith with it conclude, reasonably, that they’re done.

Because the alternative isn’t a slightly worse version of normal. It’s the thing none of us want to live through.