Thirty-three days from now, Americans will vote in the 2026 midterm elections.
There is an idea I keep returning to as that day approaches: there is an enormous difference between having a right and exercising it.
We are seeing a particularly painful example of that distinction in the case now unfolding at Cornell University.
A woman identified publicly as Jane Doe has filed a civil lawsuit alleging that she was drugged and sexually assaulted by several men at a Cornell fraternity house. Her allegations remain allegations, and the courts will ultimately determine the legal consequences. But there is something important in the act of standing up and saying:
You must hear me.
That is not an easy thing for a survivor of sexual assault to do. Women who report sexual violence have historically faced disbelief, humiliation, retaliation, scrutiny of their own behavior and, sometimes, institutions more concerned with protecting themselves than with hearing the person making the accusation.
I do not suggest that voting is comparable to the experience of reporting a sexual assault. The trauma, personal cost and courage involved are profoundly different.
But there is a principle connecting them:
Rights have little practical meaning when the people who possess them cannot—or do not—exercise them.
A woman may possess the legal right to report an assault, seek an investigation and bring a lawsuit. But if fear, intimidation or institutional resistance keeps her silent, the existence of those rights on paper may accomplish very little.
The same principle, in a very different context, applies to representative democracy.
Americans regularly say that our government derives its authority from “the people.” We call ourselves a representative democracy. We speak reverently about the right to vote.
But there is an unavoidable requirement contained within the idea of representative government:
The people must participate if they expect to be represented.
And voting is especially consequential in a midterm election because Americans are choosing the members of the branch of government that the Constitution deliberately placed alongside the presidency—not beneath it.
Congress is not an advisory committee to the president.
It is a separate and coequal branch of government.
The Constitution divides governmental authority precisely because its authors did not want too much power concentrated in one place. Congress writes laws. It controls appropriations. It conducts investigations. The Senate considers presidential appointments and treaties. Congress can override a presidential veto when the Constitution’s required supermajorities are reached. These are not procedural decorations. They are part of the machinery designed to keep one branch from dominating the others. [1]
That is why congressional elections matter regardless of who occupies the White House.
The question for voters is not simply whether they approve or disapprove of a president.
It is whether they want a Congress capable of performing the constitutional job assigned to it.
Will its members ask difficult questions?
Will they investigate executive actions when investigation is warranted?
Will they exercise independent judgment?
Will they protect Congress’s institutional authority when it conflicts with the desires of a president—including a president of their own party?
Will they remember that their oath is to the Constitution rather than to an individual?
Those questions transcend party.
A Congress that automatically opposes everything a president does is not necessarily fulfilling its constitutional function any better than a Congress that automatically approves everything a president does.
The point of checks and balances is not perpetual warfare between branches.
It is independence.
It is the expectation that legislators will legislate, executives will execute, courts will adjudicate and none will simply surrender its constitutional responsibilities to another.
That system has one indispensable participant who does not occupy an office in Washington.
Us.
The voters.
Throughout American history, enormous effort has been expended determining who gets to be included in that word.
Women fought for generations before the Constitution prohibited denial of the vote on account of sex. Black Americans confronted poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, violence and elaborate legal mechanisms devised to prevent them from exercising political power.
Those struggles tell us something important about voting.
People do not work that hard to prevent others from exercising a power that is meaningless.
And yet a democracy faces another danger for which no constitutional amendment can provide a complete remedy:
Citizens can surrender their own power simply by deciding not to use it.
No poll tax is necessary.
No literacy test is required.
No one has to stand in the doorway.
We can disenfranchise ourselves through indifference.
That is what makes the coming election about something larger than the names printed on a ballot.
It is about whether representative government will actually be representative.
It is about whether Congress will reflect the judgment of the electorate or merely the judgment of the portion of the electorate that bothered to participate.
And it is about whether Americans still understand that the constitutional balance of power ultimately depends upon people who are willing to defend it.
The president has enormous power.
Congress has enormous power.
Neither was intended to have unlimited power.
The Constitution does not maintain that balance automatically. Institutions are operated by human beings, and human beings surrender authority as readily as they exercise it. A constitutional power that lawmakers refuse to use can become almost as ineffective as a constitutional power that never existed.
That brings me back to the woman at Cornell.
Her story is not an election metaphor. Sexual assault should never be reduced to one.
But the decision to stand up when remaining silent would be easier illustrates something fundamental about human agency.
At some point, possessing a voice requires deciding whether to use it.
The courtroom and the voting booth are profoundly different places. The burdens imposed upon the people entering them are profoundly different as well.
But both rest upon an elemental assertion:
I have a voice.
I have standing.
What happens to me matters.
And I will not simply leave the decisions to everyone else.
On November 3, Americans will once again possess that choice.
We will disagree about candidates. We will disagree about parties. We will disagree about policies and about the direction of the country.
That disagreement is not the failure of democracy.
It is democracy.
The failure comes when we decide that democracy is somebody else’s responsibility.
The Constitution gave us institutions capable of checking one another, but it did not give those institutions a mind of their own. We choose the people who occupy them.
So the responsibility belongs to us.
Not merely to complain.
Not merely to post.
Not merely to watch events unfold and wonder how government acquired so much power over our lives.
But to participate.
To examine the people asking for our votes.
To ask whether they understand the independence of the office they seek.
To ask whether they will defend the constitutional authority entrusted to that office.
And then—to vote.
Vote because representative government cannot represent people who remove themselves from the process.
Vote because constitutional checks and balances depend upon the people we put in the institutions that exercise them.
Vote because political power that citizens decline to exercise does not disappear. Someone else exercises it.
And vote because generations of Americans fought, organized, marched, litigated, suffered and sometimes died over the proposition that ordinary citizens should have a voice in deciding who governs them.
We inherited that voice.
What we do with it is our responsibility.
Thirty-three days from now, the voting booth will ask each of us a remarkably simple question:
You have a voice. Will you use it?
[1] U.S. Senate, “Checks and Balances.” https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/senate-stories/checks-and-balances.htm
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