The Votes Are In. The Mandate Is Accountability.

On Wednesday morning, nearly 30 million people in Texas woke up to the news that for the first time in a generation they had turned their state blue, winning the governor’s mansion, a United States Senate seat, comptroller, land, agriculture, and ​railroad commissioners, flipping the state house to Democratic control and picking up four state Supreme Court seats, among other historic victories.It would seem impossible to characterize a result like this as anything other than a huge, hard-fought, long-sought political victory for Democratic voters. Voters who overcame years of entrenched suppression, gerrymanders rigged to minimize their power, and a cruel regime of Republican leadership that limited civil rights, vilified immigrants, and attempted to destroy prized institutions, like their flagship public universities.But like clockwork, Democratic leaders in Washington such as House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York—who very likely could be House speaker in 2027 if the momentum of this wave keeps up—made what seems impossible to those of us living in the real world depressingly and destructively possible in the narrow political world that controls our country’s fate. “This is not a partisan moment. This is a patriotic moment. This is not a blue moment or a red moment. It’s a red, white and blue moment because America has won tonight,” Jeffries said in the wake of an election that should shake everyone—including Democrats—in Washington to their core. This is not a blue moment or a red moment. This is not a blue moment or a red moment. This is not a blue moment or a red moment. Sorry, but what is this person who thinks he should be second in line for the presidency even talking about? I let these words tumble in my head over and over again, like an echoing intrusive thought. These words are a relic of a vastly different time, a different version of the country and our politics, a different version of ourselves. They are absolutely meaningless to anyone born after 2001. They are insult to voters in Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, Kansas, and Iowa. They are a lie. And their Beetlejuice-like utterance will not make our democracy, ripped away from us by Republicans as too many Democrats stood idly by, reappear.These are the words, planted like seeds 22 years ago, which sprouted a tree in the political-media industrial complex that shapes how we are told to understand politics. A tree that prioritizes generalized notions of unity, civility, and bipartisanship as outcomes central to democratic functioning. The shade of that tree provides the cover that keeps the bad faith actors overwhelmingly rejected by voters this week from the kind of accountability that would dispatch those who betrayed us to political exile, and the criminals among that set, to prison.These words give permission to everyone to view our political conditions as passive, as if politics is a fixed neutral state created by the ether. They allow elected Democrats in Washington to believe they have no agency in leveraging public policy to impact our crumbling civic infrastructure and stretched-thin Constitution to design something better. And they fueled the “both sides” approach to Washington journalism by signaling that elected Democrats, who were doing everything to prop up the federal government as Republicans tried to tear it down during this very era, were bound by a solemn promise to cater to both parties equally. We are the United States of America, after all.There will be plenty of political punditry trying to define the size and scope of a political wave and parsing the meaning of a political mandate. Yet the dominant political world view from Washington is still shaped by the decades-old declaration that “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America.” Because in the comfort of that paradigm some of the most uncomfortable—and defining—moments of the Trump era get whitewashed into legitimacy. In this worldview, it does not matter that on January 6, 2021, terrorists attacked the Capitol of the United States and 147 elected Republicans voted against a free and fair election. It does not matter that impeachment is a Constitutional duty and not a political calculation. It does not matter that Donald Trump’s federal agents have disappeared thousands of people off the streets and either deported them to countries unknown to tnem or caged them in for-profit prisons. And so on. It only matters that people elected to Congress try to come together and work across the aisle. It’s like nobody who wants to lead Democrats in Congress noticed that midterm voters attached their “I Voted” stickers to shrines built for Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo—like a second ballot cast for justice. Justice is not about “getting even” or “retribution,” as Jeffries himself batted around on the set on Morning Joe. It’s about rectifying wrongs in the hopes we get a future right. But it is past time for the Washington elite to get uncomfortable. Because there is a mandate from voters in 2026. And it’s not bipartisanship. It is, at long last, accountability.There is no democracy without accountability. There is no unity without democracy. And the truth now is that there’s no accountability without convincing the Democratic establishment in Washington that we no longer live in 2004. It’s time to rip out the unity tree by its roots. It’s time to send the civility mavens, whose hands are stained with the blood of Trump’s victims, packing.There are some moments that imprint on you. For me, it’s when I was 16 years old, sitting on the counter of my parents’ kitchen in the Chicago suburbs, watching a local TV news broadcast of the 2004 Illinois U.S. Senate Democratic debate on a 12-inch television. The field had just been blown open by scandal, and I was totally caught off guard by an unknown state senator named Barack Obama, who had a quality about him that seemed to transcend WGN-9.With my teenage hubris, I felt so savvy: I was in on a secret in March that the rest of the country would soon discover that summer at the Democratic National Committee’s Convention, when Obama delivered the keynote address that would change the course of politics. It was the speech that would launch an insurgent presidential candidacy three years later, the careers of a million political consultants who still hold a tight grip on the Democratic establishment, and, of course, the backlash that came after electing America’s first Black president, which helped usher in the racist Tea Party movement of 2010 and the rise of Donald Trump.“There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America. There’s not a Black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America,” Obama boomed to an arena full of partisans in Boston and a national TV audience. “The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”Of course, in 2004, there were Democrats and Republicans. Minorities had radically different experiences in America than their white counterparts. Gay marriage wasn’t legal. There were not two sides to the Iraq War. If anyone would know that truth, it would be Barack Obama, who ultimately would win a presidential primary for the Democratic nomination on the fact that he was not in the Senate to vote in favor of sending troops to Iraq. The absence of that vote was always more powerful than the presence of The Speech.As a teenager, I knew this reality, but I wanted to believe the words that sounded nice, even though the Iraq War and the government lies that started the war, repeated in national media, were the conditions that politically radicalized me. Like so many in my generation, I took The Speech to heart. I went to college, studied political science, moved to Washington, interned on the Hill, launched a career as a congressional reporter because government matters, so covering it is a public service. But I am an adult now. I’ve put away my childish things. I learned too much about politics. I’ve lived in a world so torn apart by grifters, billionaires, and idiots that the measles is back. Our challenges are so obvious that in 2024, my then-four-year-old said he was “voting for Kamala” because “Donald Trump does not care about other people. He only cares about himself.” I have the capacity to reassess political mythology and how it has metastasized over the course of my entire adulthood, and it seems like the millions of American voters who turned out in record fashion this week do, also.Which raises the most urgent question facing our country heading into 2027: Are national Democratic Party leaders political Peter Pans incapable of growing up or do they believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, the American people are?The Democrat who currently holds the seat from Illinois that was once held by Obama is Tammy Duckworth. In September, she joined the growing chorus of high-profile Democrats—which notably includes former vice president and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris—urging the party against attempts to impeach Donald Trump or members of his corrupt administration in 2027.“What I encourage my colleagues to not do, especially those who have more fire in their belly in this area, is don’t be impeaching anybody. Let’s just get back to work,” Duckworth said at an event sponsored by one of D.C.’s leading Democratic think tanks. “I am not interested in being in confrontation with Donald Trump … I would rather move the ball forward to the benefit of the American people. If we can do it in a way that allows him to save face and he doesn’t stop us, then that’s better for everybody all around.”It’s hard to imagine an assertion from a sitting United States Senator more wrong on both substance and politics (unless you’re counting Chuck Schumer telling Bret Stephens of The New York Times in March 2025 that his “job is to keep the left pro-Israel,” but that’s for another time).Our congresspeople’s oath to the Constitution should not be selective based on their incorrect reading of the political room. If a federal official subject to impeachment has committed impeachable offenses, they should be impeached by Congress. Otherwise, what is the point of the powers of the Constitution or of Congress itself?Exit polls showed that a top issue for voters in this midterm was “corruption.” Why not seize every available tool and opportunity to paint a stronger picture of what “corruption” actually looks like and means, both as a mechanism to build safeguards into our government and to start building the electoral case for 2028 as well? How will we ever be able to “move the ball forward” as a country if our Congress does not investigate every vulnerability exploited by fascists to unilaterally shut down agencies like the Department of Education, weaponize the Department of Justice against political opponents, summarily cancel scientific research that could have cured cancer, shutter the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or take literal bulldozers to the White House? How dare Duckworth, especially, suggest that the best way forward is to allow Trump to “save face … for the benefit of the American people” when his masked goons invaded Illinois and, in a mere 68-day period in 2025, detained 4,000 people in the Chicago area, deported 2,700 of her constituents and murdered a 38-year-old father.Why are those with the power to shape our national understanding and make change trying to pretend like the situation we are in is less dire than it is? Why are they unwilling to recognize that we can see the things they are not articulating? Why do they see this work as separate from the political foundations of the future of the Democratic party and our country?If you were to listen CNN’s Jake Tapper and political pundits of his ilk, you would believe that the number one sin of Joe Biden’s administration was that he was old. (That Trump is also old, and genuinely, demonstrably infirm seems to not excite the passions of those who dogged Biden for his advanced age at all.) But the most mortal sin of the Biden administration was that it did not take the corruption and threats of Donald Trump and the Republican Party seriously enough. In 2021, Democrats reinforced a false binary in which “accountability for crimes” and “moving forward” were held in opposition. In that reinforcement, they created the possibility and conditions for Trump’s return to power and the chaos that has since ensued. The lesson Democrats need to take away from the Trump eras is not Republicans’ corruption or desire to destroy democracy is a one-off that can be moved on from but a corrosive problem that needs to be excavated and extracted from public life. Washington Democrats believe they are stuck in a unity forcefield of their own making while the rest of us are outside the forcefield screaming at them that what we want is the opposite.Investigating, impeaching, or prosecuting traitors is not ancillary to Democrats’ work on behalf of the American people. It is the work. And Republicans were never going to do it, unless their backs were kept against the wall.The truth of the Biden Era is that January 6, 2021, was a dark day for our democracy. But what was darker was every day that came after: When Washington, D.C., tried to return to its “normal” by holding an inauguration ceremony at the scene of the crime so Jennifer Lopez could sing, inviting Republicans who rejected the results of a free and fair election to black tie state dinners and ending Trump’s impeachment trial early so top Biden ally Sen. Chris Coons could “go home for Valentine’s Day.”The people who botched our chances at recovery after the 2020 election have only grown in their platforms, while the sentiment against their conventional wisdom has grown equally if not faster. In her very first White House press briefing, Jen Psaki, an Obama alum who now shapes the political narrative for our boomer parents on MS NOW, faced a loaded question about impeachment, a process the reporter suggested was so “divisive” that the president should consider asking Congress to drop it lest he risk spoiling his promise of “unifying the country.”Psaki didn’t contest the framing or emphasize that holding Trump and his enablers accountable was imperative to unifying the country. Instead, she said: “It is the [president’s] view is that the way to bring the country together is to address the problems we’re facing. And so that means getting this COVID relief package through. And he’s going to leave the mechanics, the timing, and the specifics of how Congress moves forward on impeachment to them.”Every time “the problems we’re facing” is divorced from toxic and fascist politics held by Republicans, Democrats are failing—failing to address the dire problems that have infected our body politic, and failing at bringing the country together on a regime of accountability for wrongdoers, for corrupt actors, for traitors. Asking everyday people to overcome barriers to voting, gerrymanders, and decades of suppression to vote out Republicans en masse is not tantamount to accountability and not a sustainable strategy for maintaining governance and repairing the deep damage that already has been done. That voters have now done so obligates Democrats to take up the missions that they have thus far forsaken.They want to hear more refrains of “Lawyer Up” from future House committee chairpeople like Robert Garcia and less empty social media rhetoric from Obama himself that tells us “we want a politics that brings people together rather than divides them,” without acknowledging that creating a shared reality and basis of fact is what can get us there.The voters know the score. The politicians we just elected know it as well. But the question is whether Democratic leaders in Congress, specifically Jeffries and Schumer, are prepared to wage a completely different kind of political warfare that leaves the obsolete Obama Way in the dust. To accept that the reason we gave them a wave is not just gas prices because the roundtable on Morning Joe says so. If they can’t accept that, it’s time for them to be replaced.The difficult, painstaking and necessary work of rebuilding our government and safeguarding democracy is built on oversight and accountability, not without it.This is the beginning of the closing window to save the country from the abyss. Our 2028 votes go to the political leaders with the courage to say so out loud. Unless we want our nation’s epitaph to be: There is no Red America. There is no Blue America. There is no America at all.