Just amazing to me how we've frog-boiled ourselves into a situation where Dems don't just need to win institutions to pass policies--they need to hit magical, artificial, ever-receding supermajorities

Back in 2009, when Ds had 60 votes in the Senate, that was just barely enough to get a health-care reform. When Ds have majorities in the House, they're constantly told that they're "going too far". And now it's basically baked in that Biden has to win by a landslide.

When every institution becomes countermajoritarian by degrees, what, exactly, are we supposed to call that?

And I'm not even talking about the obvious countermajoritarian flaws, like the Senate, the Electoral College, or even geographic districts in the House. Just the creeping rise in every little procedural barrier that makes every reform a decades-long trench-warfare battle.