Case Study 2 — Bipartisan and Partisan-Coded Reform Efforts Compared

The chapter argues that some reforms attract bipartisan coalitions and pass; others are partisan-coded and fail. The argument is structural, not normative — it does not claim which reforms are correct, only which are likely to be enacted under current political conditions. This case study tests the argument by comparing five reform efforts from the 117th Congress and shortly after (2021–2024). Two passed. Three failed. The pattern is informative.

The five reforms

1. Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA, December 2022) — PASSED

Discussed in detail in Case Study 1. Bipartisan coalition (eighteen Republican senators voted for cloture). Narrow scope (specific 1887 statute loopholes). Shared threat (both parties recognized the exposed vulnerabilities). No visible partisan advantage (the Vice President's ceremonial role applies to VPs of both parties). Sustained coalition over eighteen months. Result: enacted as part of the December 2022 omnibus.

2. Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (2021–22) — FAILED

The Freedom to Vote Act would have established federal floors for state election administration: automatic voter registration, vote-by-mail standards, restrictions on aggressive voter-list maintenance, statutory protection against partisan gerrymandering, restoration of pre-clearance under the Voting Rights Act, and other provisions. The John Lewis VRA would have responded specifically to Shelby County v. Holder (2013) by re-establishing the federal preclearance regime under a new statutory formula.

Both bills passed the House. Both were blocked by Senate filibuster. A separate effort to carve out a filibuster exception for voting rights legislation failed in January 2022 when Senators Manchin and Sinema voted against the rules change.

The Republican objection was substantive (the bills were federal preemption of state election authority that exceeded what Congress had attempted historically, with the partial exception of the original VRA's preclearance for jurisdictions with documented histories of voting discrimination) and procedural (the filibuster threshold should not be lowered for legislation that one party views as advantageous to itself).

The Democratic argument was that the post-Shelby loss of federal preclearance authority required federal restoration; that state-level changes since 2013 had produced asymmetric effects; and that the constitutional authority for the legislation derived from the Reconstruction Amendments' enforcement clauses.

Result: failed. The reforms did not satisfy the bipartisan-success conditions. The coalition was effectively partisan; the threat was contested rather than shared; the proposal was perceived (correctly or not) as advantaging one party; and the sustained coalition required to overcome the filibuster did not include any Republican support.

3. Permitting reform (2022–24) — PARTIAL PROGRESS

Permitting reform addresses the time required for federal environmental review of infrastructure and energy projects. The Manchin-Barrasso framework attempted in late 2022 collapsed when Senate progressives concerned about environmental review erosion, and Senate conservatives concerned about state-authority preemption, both balked. Subsequent provisions in the FY2024 debt-ceiling agreement (the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023) addressed parts of the agenda — modest revisions to the National Environmental Policy Act timelines, the controversial approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, and other provisions.

The substantive overlap between progressive (clean-energy buildout) and conservative (resource development) versions of permitting reform is significant. The political assembly has not yet produced comprehensive reform, but the partial progress shows that bipartisan coalition formation is possible.

Result: partial progress. The reform partly satisfies the success conditions: shared threat (slow infrastructure deployment is a problem both parties recognize), genuine cross-partisan support, and sustained coalition. The visible partisan-advantage condition is more contested — different versions of permitting reform advantage different industries with different partisan implications.

4. Filibuster reform (2021–24) — FAILED

Various proposals to reform the Senate filibuster — outright abolition, lowering the cloture threshold, restoring the talking filibuster, carve-outs for specific categories — have circulated continuously. None has commanded the support of a majority of senators in either party. The 2022 vote on a voting-rights-specific filibuster carve-out failed.

The asymmetry in the politics is identifiable: each party's senators tend to support filibuster reform when in the majority and oppose it when in the minority. The institutional logic — both parties expect to be in the minority again — is the binding constraint.

Result: failed. The reform fails all four bipartisan-success conditions. The scope is comprehensive (alters foundational chamber operation), the threat is partisan-coded (one party's perception of obstruction is the other party's perception of legitimate minority protection), the proposal visibly advantages whichever party currently holds the majority, and no sustained cross-partisan coalition exists.

5. Court packing / court expansion (2020–24) — FAILED

The proposal to expand the Supreme Court — most often discussed as adding two or four justices to the current nine — was raised by progressive advocates after the 2020 confirmation of Justice Barrett. The 2021 Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court reviewed the proposal but did not endorse it. Legislative proposals (the Judiciary Act of 2021) were introduced but did not advance.

Even within the Democratic Party, support for expansion was contested. President Biden was personally cool to the idea. Justice Ginsburg (before her 2020 death) had publicly opposed expansion on legitimacy grounds. A bipartisan coalition for expansion was not available.

Result: failed. The reform fails the bipartisan-success conditions decisively: comprehensive scope, partisan-coded threat (one party's view of the Court's legitimacy crisis is the other party's view of normal constitutional politics), unmistakable partisan advantage in the proposal as offered, and no sustained cross-partisan coalition.

What the comparison shows

The five cases test the chapter's structural argument about reform success. The pattern holds.

ECRA passed because it satisfied all four conditions. Narrow scope, shared threat, no visible partisan advantage in the central provisions, sustained coalition.

Permitting reform achieved partial progress because it satisfies most conditions. Sustained coalition exists; threat is broadly shared; partisan-advantage perception is the weakest condition.

Voting-rights legislation, filibuster reform, and court packing failed because they violated multiple conditions. Each was perceived (correctly or not, the perception is what mattered politically) as advantaging one party; each had comprehensive rather than narrow scope; each lacked sustained cross-partisan coalition.

The pattern is not a complete theory of reform. There are exceptions — sometimes reforms pass that should not have, sometimes reforms fail that should have passed — but the four conditions track the empirical pattern of the past decade reasonably well.

Implications

The argument can be uncomfortable for advocates of reform on either side. Progressives who want voting-rights legislation, court reform, campaign-finance reform, and the Freedom to Vote Act may prefer those reforms over their alternatives, but the structural conditions for their bipartisan enactment have not existed. Conservatives who want term limits, the REINS Act, or Project 2025-style executive reorganization may prefer those reforms, but the structural conditions for their bipartisan enactment have not existed either.

What has been enacted is what the structural conditions allow: ECRA, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act (in narrowly partisan form on final passage but with significant bipartisan substantive input on permitting and other provisions), the PACT Act, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, and the Respect for Marriage Act. Each of these reforms has its critics on both left and right who prefer either more or less than what passed.

The implication for advocates of large-scale reform is that, under current political conditions, the path through Congress is narrow and the reforms that fit the path are narrow. Reform-minded actors who wish to expand the path face a separate problem: changing the structural conditions themselves (polarization levels, primary-election dynamics, media incentives, civic-engagement levels) is a longer-term project than passing any individual piece of legislation.

The implication for analytical understanding — which is the implication that this textbook emphasizes — is that the question "why does reform fail?" usually has a structural answer, not a personality answer. Senators who oppose reforms their party would benefit from are not always being cynical; they may be operating under the institutional logic that what they enable today their successors will face tomorrow.

A concluding observation

Structural reform can succeed when the threat is shared and the proposal is narrow. The Electoral Count Reform Act demonstrates that the bipartisan zone is real, even in highly polarized times. It also demonstrates that the bipartisan zone is narrow. Reforms that fit within it can move; reforms that exceed it cannot, under current conditions, regardless of their merits.

Whether the structural conditions can change — whether civic engagement can broaden the bipartisan zone, whether election reforms can produce different incentive structures, whether civil-society dialogue can reduce affective polarization — is the open question that this textbook hands forward to its readers. The chapter's final substantive section, on the civic-engagement layer, is the chapter's argument that the question is not closed. It is open. The work of opening it is the readers'.

Comparative reflections

A few additional observations about the comparison. Bipartisan reform is not a synonym for centrism. ECRA was not a centrist reform; it was a narrow, threat-driven technical reform that senators of both parties supported because it addressed a specific institutional problem that both parties recognized. The senators who supported ECRA included some of the most ideologically committed members of each conference. What they shared was not a substantive agreement about the broader political moment, but a procedural agreement that the 1887 statute's loopholes were a problem that warranted fixing.

Failure of reform is not necessarily failure of process. The Freedom to Vote Act, court packing, and filibuster reform did not pass because the political conditions for their enactment did not exist. That is not a process failure; it is a description of the political conditions. Reform advocates who treat failure as evidence of process pathology may be misdiagnosing the problem. The remedy for political conditions that prevent enactment of preferred reforms is changing the political conditions — through electoral mobilization, through coalition-building, through civic engagement at scale. The remedy is not necessarily process reform.

Time matters. ECRA took eighteen months of sustained negotiation to pass; some of the bipartisan reforms that succeeded in 2021–22 (the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, CHIPS, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the Respect for Marriage Act) took shorter or longer periods. The political work of building coalitions for reform is slow. Advocates who expect rapid enactment of comprehensive reform agendas may be misjudging how reform actually moves through the system. The pattern across recent successes is that sustained, narrowly scoped, threat-driven coalitions can move legislation that comprehensive partisan-coded packages cannot.

The case study's purpose, finally, is analytical rather than prescriptive. It does not tell readers which reforms to support. It identifies the structural features of those reforms that have moved through the system and those that have not. With that analytical capacity, readers can make their own judgments about which reforms they wish to support and which strategic conditions are most plausibly available to them.