Commentary by George Sisca
By Wednesday morning, I was beginning to fear that Americans had voted for an earthquake and Washington would deliver a change of stationery.
The relief was real. So was the possibility. What remained uncertain was whether Democratic leaders understood the difference between an invitation to govern differently and an invitation to return.
Kansas has elected its first Democratic U.S. senator since 1932. Mississippi’s Senate race remains unresolved, with a Democrat narrowly ahead. In Texas, Republicans have discovered that even a congressional map drawn to protect their power cannot guarantee the cooperation of the people living inside it. There is considerable pleasure in watching voters exceed the ambitions assigned to them.
For once, hope has evidence.
I am trying to enjoy it before someone appoints a committee to explain its limitations.
Already, the prospect of Hakeem Jeffries leading the House and Chuck Schumer returning to lead the Senate has given the celebration an uncomfortable familiarity. The electorate has delivered a remarkable upheaval; Washington is preparing the seating chart. My fear is that Democratic leaders will mistake the public’s willingness to entrust them with power for satisfaction with the way they have exercised it.
That is where the hopium enters the bloodstream: in the distance between what an election makes possible and what we persuade ourselves its winners intend to do.
“The American people don’t want us to get even,” Jeffries said Wednesday. He also explicitly endorsed accountability for wrongdoing, “The American people don’t want us to get even,” Jeffries said Wednesday. In the same interview, he endorsed holding wrongdoers accountable. I welcome that commitment. What troubles me is the eagerness to reassure Washington of our restraint before demonstrating to the public that accountability will have teeth.
There is a peculiar presumption in that sequence. Citizens who have spent years watching powerful people evade consequences are invited to demonstrate their civic maturity by moderating their expectations of consequences. Their anger becomes a problem to manage. The conduct that produced it becomes a matter to approach judiciously, at an appropriate time, through the proper channels.
I know those channels. Trying to get something accomplished in American public life increasingly resembles being transferred through a telephone system whose principal achievement is preserving the innocence of every department.
Somewhere, authority exists. Responsibility is harder to locate.
This is the larger failure I want Democrats to confront: a government in which power is concentrated enough to serve the well connected and responsibility is dispersed enough to frustrate everyone else. Changing the party in charge will mean very little if the incoming leadership intends to preserve that arrangement and improve its manners.
Democrats cannot understand the opportunity before them without examining their own contribution to the catastrophe that preceded it. Trump bears responsibility for his conduct. The people who promised to keep him from power still owe an account of why their promise failed.
That reckoning must include Gaza.
For me, Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza remains a stain on his presidency and on a party that invoked human rights while supplying the Israeli government with military and diplomatic support. The resulting rupture was visible before the 2024 election: Arab and Muslim voters described profound disillusionment with the administration, while Harris offered no substantial break over weapons deliveries. The electoral consequences cannot be reduced to a single cause, but the breach of trust deserves examination on its own terms. Palestinian lives do not acquire moral significance only when their loss affects a Michigan precinct.
Nor can Democrats explain away the distance between their economic assurances and the household arithmetic confronting voters. AP VoteCast found that voters who considered inflation the most important factor in their decision supported Trump over Harris by nearly two to one. Whatever the administration could demonstrate in aggregate, millions of people were judging its performance at the checkout counter.
Public spending requires a more demanding defense than the announcement that money has been committed. What problem will it solve? Why is this approach preferable? How will anyone know whether it worked? A government asking for public confidence should be able to answer those questions before congratulating itself on the appropriation.
Cumberland’s school redistricting dispute brings that obligation close to home.
The district says its involvement with TransPar began through a state transportation study and expanded to include school boundary analysis and recommendations. There are legitimate reasons to seek outside expertise. Enrollment changes, buildings have limits, and every boundary decision involves competing needs. Precisely because those choices affect children and families, the reasoning must be available for public examination.
Who established the consultant’s priorities? How were classroom capacity, future growth, neighborhood continuity and transportation weighed against one another? Which alternatives were rejected, and what made the preferred option better?
Those are questions about the work taxpayers purchased. Hiring someone to exercise judgment does not relieve elected officials of the obligation to exercise their own.
As I have argued in covering this process, if Cumberland’s children have to show their work, the adults rearranging their schools should be prepared to do the same.
The danger extends beyond one contract or one disputed map. Every time government treats a reasonable request for explanation as an obstacle to completing its business, it teaches residents something about their place in the institution. They may finance the decision. They may live with its consequences. Understanding it, apparently, is an additional service.
I want this victory to matter beyond the relief it has provided. I want investigations that follow evidence wherever it leads, leadership that can withstand the displeasure of its donors, and public institutions capable of explaining both their decisions and who must answer for them.
For the moment, I am allowing myself to believe that such things remain possible.
I would prefer not to discover that the hope was the only part we were ever going to get.
