Last week the people of this country did something big.
They walked into voting booths from Kansas to Maine and said, as plain as they know how, that they were done with business as usual.
They threw out a Congress. They flipped states that hadn’t flipped in a lifetime. They sent a message that a child could read.
And this week, the folks they sent the message to are meeting behind a closed door to decide whether to ignore it.
I want to talk about that door.
This week, Senate Democrats choose their leader for the next two years. They do it by secret ballot, and no voter gets a say. It’s just the senators, sitting sitting and newly elected, in a room, deciding who runs the show.
The man who has run it for nearly ten years is Chuck Schumer. And right now, from everything being reported, he’s likely to keep the job.
Now, I want to be fair here. Schumer was the leader when Democrats took back the Senate. In Washington that counts for a lot. One senator said winning the Senate “certainly justifies another term.” I understand that thinking. A coach who wins the game usually keeps his job.
But let me ask you something.
Who won this game?
It wasn’t Chuck Schumer. It was you. It was the woman who stood in line for two hours after work. It was the young man who voted for the first time. It was the farmer in Kansas who had never voted for a Democrat in his life and did it this time anyway.
You won it. And you didn’t win it so the same people could keep the same chairs.
Here’s how I know.
Look at who won. In Kansas, a Democrat named Adam Hamilton won a Senate seat. That hasn’t happened in nearly a hundred years. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed won. In Maine, Troy Jackson won.
All three of them said the same thing during their campaigns. They said they would not back Chuck Schumer as leader.
They didn’t hide it. They ran on it. And the voters sent them to Washington anyway. Maybe even because of it.
That should tell the people in that room something.
And it’s not just three new senators. Back in June, a Politico poll asked Democratic voters whether Schumer should stay in leadership. Forty-seven percent said no. Only twenty-eight percent said yes. That’s his own side of the aisle telling him it’s time.
So what’s the room doing about it?
Here’s what’s being reported. There’s a deal going around. It goes something like this. Schumer keeps the job, but he agrees to retire when his term ends in two years.
Think about that for a minute.
That’s not change. That’s a promise of change, two years from now, from the same people who didn’t change this time. It’s a deal made behind a door the voters can’t open.
That’s the inside slide.
You’ve seen it before, whether it’s in politics, at work, or in your own town. Something big happens. The people speak up. And then the folks on the inside quietly slide things back to where they were. Nobody announces it. Nobody votes on it in public. It just happens, one handshake at a time.
And then they wonder why people don’t trust them.
I want to be careful about one thing. I’m not saying the voters walked in and voted against Chuck Schumer by name. His name wasn’t on any ballot. Most of the anger this year was aimed at the White House, and rightly so.
But the voters did vote against something bigger than one man. They voted against the inside game. They voted against leaders who make deals behind closed doors and call it strategy. They voted against being told to wait. Wait your turn. Wait for the right time. Wait two more years.
They’ve been waiting a long time.
And here’s what worries me most. If the first thing Democrats do with their new power is protect the old way of doing things, they’re going to lose the very people who handed them that power.
Voters aren’t loyal to a party anymore. Not the way they used to be. They’re loyal to results. They’ll give you a chance, and if you waste it, they’ll take it back. Republicans just learned that the hard way.
Democrats shouldn’t need to learn it twice.
So what can you do about a vote you don’t get to cast?
More than you think.
You can call your senator this week. Today, if you can. You don’t have to be rude. Just ask a simple question. Who are you voting for as leader, and why?
You’d be surprised how much it rattles a senator to know the folks back home are watching a vote they thought nobody cared about.
You can tell them what you told them on November 3. You voted for change. Not change later. Not change after one more term. Change.
And if your senator is one of the new ones, the ones who promised to shake things up, you can remind them of that promise before the ink is dry.
That’s how you stop the slide. You shine a light on the door.
The folks on the inside count on the rest of us getting tired and going home. They count on us celebrating the win and then looking away while they divide up the prize.
Not this time.
We danced in the streets. We started humming at the noise. We watched the veto start to crack.
Now we keep watching. Because the work didn’t end on November 3. That’s the day it started.
The people spoke.
Make sure the room heard it.
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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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