The news cycles arrive with numbing regularity now, each one another small tremor in the foundations of American institutional life. Wednesday brings word of Virginia voters approving a Democratic redistricting plan, a straightforward electoral victory that might have seemed unremarkable in an earlier era. But it arrives amid a more troubling story—one about the fragility of procedural consensus in Congress and the creeping sense that the mechanisms meant to police serious misconduct are themselves becoming instruments of factional advantage.
These are not isolated stories. They are chapters in an ongoing narrative about institutional decay, written by lawmakers themselves. The Virginia redistricting referendum appears democratically clean: voters had their say, and the popular will expressed itself through constitutional amendment. Yet the simultaneous unraveling of congressional expulsion norms reveals something far more unsettling: a body politic unsure whether it should expel its own members for serious wrongdoing, not from lack of will, but from fear of setting precedents that might one day be weaponized against one's own side.
The Redistricting Victory and Its Hollow Sound
Virginia's approval of the Democratic redistricting map deserves credit for its procedural legitimacy. When Americans vote directly on questions of representation through ballot referenda, something recognizably democratic occurs. The Virginia electorate made a choice, albeit one weighted toward partisan advantage—as most such maps are. This is how the system has come to work. The alternative, of course, would be independent commissions insulated from political pressure, but those remain rare creatures in American politics.
What merits scrutiny is not the Virginia vote itself but what it illuminates about the larger landscape. The map could deliver as many as four new Democratic seats. The specificity of that projection suggests the precision with which modern cartography serves partisan ends. In another era, redistricting felt like a necessary evil; now it has become one of the primary battlegrounds where electoral dominance is secured or lost. The very techniques that allow for such accuracy—precinct-level demographic analysis, granular voter behavior modeling, computational optimization—have made the gerrymandering itself both more scientific and more consequential.
That voters approved this configuration speaks to something complicated about American democracy. It may suggest that Virginians view the Republican alternative as sufficiently undesirable that Democratic advantage seemed preferable. Or it may simply indicate that voters, when given a choice between competing maps, lack sufficient information to render meaningful judgment. Either way, the story reminds us that even democratic forms can produce outcomes that feel predetermined, that the appearance of choice does not necessarily equal authentic democratic deliberation.
The Crisis of Congressional Accountability
The more disturbing story concerns what some Democratic lawmakers now acknowledge: buyer's remorse about their vote to expel George Santos. The former New York representative was removed in 2023 after an ethics investigation detailed what the committee termed "a complex web of unlawful activity." At the time, the vote passed overwhelmingly, 311 to 114. Santos later pleaded guilty to wire fraud and identity theft, seemingly validating the expulsion decision.
Yet now that the same mechanics that removed Santos have moved toward Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida—who resigned Tuesday before an expulsion vote—some Democrats are reconsidering. The Ethics Committee found Cherfilus-McCormick guilty of funneling $5 million in misallocated COVID funds to her campaign. She awaits criminal indictment. By any measure, this represents serious misconduct. Yet several Democratic representatives have begun asking whether Congress should expel members before criminal trials conclude, before convictions materialize, before the full judicial process runs its course.
The concern expressed by Representatives Hank Johnson, Emanuel Cleaver, Jonathan Jackson, and Sydney Kamlager-Dove centers on due process—a principle not of left or right but fundamental to liberal democracy itself. "Why we think we should get in front of cases, judges, charges, juries, is beyond me," Kamlager-Dove asked. It is a fair question, and an unsettling one, because it implies that the Democratic majority may have constructed a precedent it now regrets. In a chamber controlled by the other party, that precedent could easily become a cudgel.
Meanwhile, Representative Nancy Mace signals plans to force a vote to expel Cory Mills, a Florida Republican accused of domestic abuse, financial misconduct, and stolen valor. Mills denies the allegations and, unlike Cherfilus-McCormick, refuses to resign. The stage is set for a test of whether the expulsion precedent will apply equally across party lines or whether it will become another tool of partisan advantage. The anxiety among some Democrats suggests they fear the latter.
The Accountability Paradox We Cannot Escape
Congress finds itself trapped between two unsustainable positions. If lawmakers expel members before criminal conviction, they risk weaponizing the procedure, creating political incentives to remove opposing party members on thin or contested grounds. But if they decline to act, they risk signaling that serious misconduct—fraud, corruption, abuse—requires no parliamentary response short of criminal conviction. Neither position sits comfortably with the notion that Congress should police its own house.
The genius of the old Senate, for all its faults, rested partly on the understanding that expulsion represented an extraordinary remedy. It was rare. The proceedings, when they occurred, bore the weight of institutional gravity. Lawmakers seemed to grasp that once the precedent loosened, once expulsion became a tool readily available to majorities, the institution itself would be diminished. The Ethics Committee would cease to be investigatory body and become a partisan battering ram.
That the current Congress appears unable to navigate this tension—that Democrats now second-guess a vote that at the moment seemed necessary—suggests an institution no longer certain of its own standards. When lawmakers cannot explain coherently why they voted to expel one member but not another, when their justifications shift depending on party affiliation, the problem is not too much accountability but too little institutional self-respect.
The Machinery Indifferent to Principle
These stories arrive as the Trump administration moves forward with its own aggressive agenda: $70 billion in immigration enforcement spending, extended talks with Iran, the withdrawal of subpoenas in the John Brennan investigation. The FBI director shouts at reporters over reports of excessive alcohol consumption. The Department of Justice indicts the Southern Poverty Law Center on fraud charges, a move that invites questions about prosecutorial motivation as much as institutional propriety.
Against this backdrop, Virginia's redistricting vote and Congress's expulsion anxiety seem less like discrete stories and more like symptoms of the same underlying condition. American institutions are grinding forward, pursuing their respective agendas, but increasingly without the procedural consensus that once legitimized their operations. We have rules, but diminishing agreement about what the rules mean. We have processes, but declining faith that those processes operate fairly. We have precedents, but growing uncertainty about whether they will be applied consistently.
The machinery of power operates still. Voters cast ballots. Committees investigate. Congress votes. But each action taken now risks becoming a precedent weaponized later, which means fewer lawmakers dare risk principled stands on behalf of abstract institutional values. The result is politics by other means, dressed in procedural language but motivated by the most familiar incentives: partisan advantage, power retention, the settling of scores. Virginia approved a map that will reduce Republican representation. Some Democrats now worry they created tools for their future opponents. The cycle continues, impervious to irony.