Democrats in Congress say they can't do anything because Republicans control Congress. That's a lie, folks. It's not a mistake. It's not being naive. It's a lie. Every member of Congress knows it's a lie. Every senior staffer knows it's a lie. Anyone who's ever worked in or near the capital knows. They're saying it because it serves them. If the problem is structural, not chosen, they escape accountability. Can't blame us for what we don't do. We don't have the majority. That's how Congress works. Give us the majority in the midterms. Till then, our hands are tied.

Nope, their hands aren't tied. Members of Congress have stuck their hands in their pockets.

Hey folks, I'm Tad Sturmer. I'm an American scholar of resistance history at the University of Southern Denmark and the author of A Resistance History of the United States. I'm also a former congressional staffer with floor privileges in both the House and the Senate.

Both chambers have tools available to the minority. The House is a bit more constrained—the speaker and the rules committee control more of the floor—but the minority isn't powerless there either. But let's start with the Senate because that's where minority power is greatest.

In the Senate, a single senator—one person—can grind the chamber to a halt.The rules are built that way. And Democrats aren't using any of it.

So, let's start with what they're saying about it. You've heard the line probably: Republicans control the Senate. The majority sets the agenda. The minority can object, sure, but the majority rules. If you don't understand that, as so many experts on social media keep telling me, you don't understand how Congress works.

And you've probably heard it from people you know. It seems informed. It sounds reasonable, sober, the grown-up position. And it's utter nonsense.

The Senate is not a majoritarian institution. It has never functioned as winner-take-all. Ever. And the filibuster alone makes that obvious. But even setting the filibuster aside, Senate procedure requires broad consent to function. An agreement that we call unanimous consent isn't a courtesy. It's a mechanism that allows the chamber to move at all. Without it, the Senate doesn't run efficiently. Actually, it doesn't run.

So minorities in Congress have obstructed, delayed, and extracted concessions from majorities for the entire history of this country. The Senate was built to empower minorities—originally to protect enslavers, of course. But the structural reality remains.

So when Democrats say the minority is powerless, there are only two possibilities:

One: They're right. The rules have changed. The institution has been transformed. Congress is at a point it has never been at in all of American history, now running on pure brute majority power. And everything we knew about legislative procedure is obsolete. If that's true, this is indeed unprecedented and it means the entire system has already fundamentally broken down. Structural remedies, not electoral ones, are required. We're not talking about winning in 2026. That won't do any good. We're talking about the whole thing itself has already failed.

Two: Call me crazy on this. They're lying. They know perfectly well what tools exist. They're choosing not to use them because it's uncomfortable. Because it threatens their standing with their treasured colleagues. Because it might cost them access and goodwill they value more than opposition. Lindsey Graham might cast them a side-eye. They're telling you the minority is powerless because it shields them from accountability for refusing to fight.

Both are problems, but only one is true. And it's not the first one.

What Can They Do Today?

Well, there's some easy stuff. The Senate runs on unanimous consent—"without objection,"nemine contradicente. It's how the chamber skips procedures that take up time. One senator—any senator—Bernie Sanders, Murphy, Blumenthal, Booker, pick your favorite—can object and force full procedure on everything.

Here's what it looks like in practice:

Proceeding to a bill: Follow along on C-SPAN with this. Put it on a bingo card. Make it a drinking game. Note every time a floor leader asks for unanimous consent to proceed to consideration of a bill—done in seconds. If someone objects, the leader has to file a motion to proceed, which can be debated. That means potential filibuster, cloture vote, eating up two days just to get to the vote and 30 hours of post-cloture time. Days of floor time just to start considering a single bill.

Amendments: Normally read by title only by UC. Object and the full text of every amendment has to be read aloud by the clerk. A complicated amendment can take an hour. A long one, several hours. Write them. You could be there for days.

Voting: Normally, the leader asks UC to schedule votes at specific times and you stack them back to back—we used to call them "vote-a-ramas"—shortening the voting window. But you object and each vote takes its full 15-plus minutes that can't be stacked efficiently. The schedule falls apart.

Adjournment and recess: Even ending the day requires UC to set the time. Object and the Senate has to hold a vote on when to adjourn. That's 15 more minutes minimum.

Routine business: Entering documents into the record, referring bills to committees, approving the previous day's journal—dozens of small administrative tasks happen by UC every single day. Force votes or full procedure on each one and the whole calendar explodes.

And there's a cumulative effect. A Senate that normally processes dozens of items in a single day grinds down to maybe a handful. Leadership has to burn floor time on procedural votes instead of substance. The schedule becomes unpredictable. Senators can't plan travel. Weekends disappear. The chamber becomes a place no one wants to be.

But wait, there's more:

Quorum calls: Any senator can suggest the absence of a quorum at almost any time and it forces a roll call. Every senator's name read aloud. Response is recorded. Takes time. Repeat it and repeat it.

Recorded votes: Any senator can require a roll call vote instead of a voice vote. Minimum 15 minutes each, usually longer. Dozens of opportunities every day. Do the math.

Reading legislation aloud: The Senate usually waives that by UC. Don't consent. A major bill takes hours.

None of this is arcane. It's in the standing rules. Every senator knows. Every staffer with floor privileges knows. Hell, every lobbyist and journalist covering Congress knows.

But Why Won't They Do It?

Three reasons. None of them good.

First, it shields them from accountability. If the problem is structural—"we're in the minority, our hands are tied, this is just how it works"—then no individual Democrat bears responsibility for failing to resist. It's not their fault. It's the math. Give them the majority and they'll fight. Promise. That's ridiculous. Minorities have made majorities miserable throughout American history. It's only impossible now? What changed? Not the rules. Not the procedures. The excuses.

Second, institutionalist delusion. The fear—it's kind of a cowardice—that whatever they do, Republicans will do back to them. Comity. Bipartisanship. They believe that if they preserve norms, the other side will eventually reciprocate. That if they don't swing, the other side won't swing back. This is the logic of people who weren't paying attention when Mitch McConnell invented a new standard to block Merrick Garland—"no Supreme Court confirmations in an election year"—and then discarded it to ram through Amy Coney Barrett while people were already voting. The rules haven't applied to the right for years. Democrats are honoring norms the other side abandoned a decade ago.

Third, and this is the most human: it's uncomfortable. These tactics make everyone's life harder. They keep senators on the floor. They cancel weekends. They delay the flight home. They make colleagues cranky. Nobody gets to the Capitol Grill on time. The institution becomes genuinely unpleasant.

And that's exactly the point.

The Resistance Lesson

Resistance doesn't move at scale until the comfortable become uncomfortable. That's always been the tipping point. Not moral clarity—discomfort. The cost of doing nothing has to exceed the cost of doing something. And the comfortable have to feel it. They can't just think it.

So start with members of Congress. Make their lives unpleasant. Make the floor a slog. Make every procedural step a battle. They don't like it? Step aside for someone who will fight that fight.

Thoreau had the formulation: Be the friction in the machine. The machine that's grinding you down. You might not stop it, but you can slow it. You can gum it up. And possibly—possibly—in gumming it up so much, you can break it.

The Call to Action

Everyone else: you now have a list. Withholding unanimous consent. Quorum calls. Demanding recorded votes. Forcing bills to be read aloud. These are real tools available today, requiring nothing but the will to use them.

Call your senator's office. Don't ask if they support some bill. Ask why they're not objecting to unanimous consent requests. Ask how many quorum calls they forced this week. Ask why they're letting the chamber run smoothly while the regime takes over sovereign nations and deports its own people.

When they tell you the minority can't do anything, you now know that's a lie. Make them explain it. Make them be specific. Make them tell you exactly why they've chosen not to use the tools that exist.

They can't answer you. If they try to, you have an answer.

Now go to work.