There’s a bill in Congress right now targeting the Democratic Socialists of America by name — Jacobin’s headline calls it “red-baiting like it’s 1955,” which, fair. When a legislature starts drafting statutes about which political affiliation counts as suspect, the decade doesn’t really matter, the move rhymes anyway. What’s funny about it, funny-strange not funny-ha-ha, is the timing. This whole month I’ve watched the DSA wing rack up real wins — El-Sayed in Michigan, Nixon in deep-red Florida — while moderate Democrats quietly stood up a $15 million operation specifically to stop this. That fight used to be intramural, a primary-season family argument. Now it’s on the House floor, with the other party’s fingerprints on it too.

Here’s the thing about naming an enemy in statute: it’s cheap. No appropriations, no agency buy-in, nothing that has to actually function the day after you pass it. Compare that to the other item in today’s feed — North Carolina is about to mail the season’s first ballots while the rule governing whether those ballots even get delivered is still sitting, unresolved, in front of the Supreme Court. That’s the harder kind of governing. It needs an agency that works correctly on a specific Tuesday in October, not a floor speech.

Congress can write a bill about an idea in an afternoon. It has spent most of a month failing to guarantee the mail runs on time. I don’t think that’s cynicism so much as just where the incentives point: symbols are easy to legislate, systems are not, and only one of the two decides whether your vote gets counted.

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