Democrats in the Senate find themselves stymied at every turn by the Republican minority plus two of their own — Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — who insist that bipartisan consensus is the only way forward on contentious issues like voting rights. So far, however, the opponents haven't gone much beyond using the word "no" repeatedly to explain their objections or outline what modifications they would find acceptable in the two voting rights bills before the Senate. The typical GOP response is to accuse the Democrats of trying to manipulate future elections.

"This is not about voting rights," Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn told Fox News on Tuesday. "This is about a partisan political power grab, and they are just trying to dress it up and sell it as something else."

His junior colleague, Ted Cruz, told reporters that Democrats are "willing to go to any length to tear down the reasonable, commonsense protections that protect the integrity of our elections."

Absent in such responses is any semblance of voting-rights measures the Republicans can embrace. The fact is, methods employed in the 2020 election to make pandemic-era voting safer and easier — such as allowing early voting, mail-in balloting and depositing filled ballots into official ballot boxes installed on city and county streets — are measures that had already been allowed in Republican-controlled states.

Why are congressional Republicans trying to reverse such measures now? Because long-term demographic trends do not bode well for Republicans, especially as minority populations that tend to vote Democratic are on the rise and white populations that tend to vote Republican are diminishing. Which is why Republicans are doing everything they can to make voting and voter registration harder, not easier, for minorities.

President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress can complain all they want about the unfairness of it all, but the bottom line is inarguable: They don't have the votes to get what they want. Democratic strategist James Carville's advice is for them to move on and "quit being a whiny party."

Instead of complaining, they must force Republicans to stop speaking in generalities about power grabs and get specific about measures they are actually willing to accept to yield a truly bipartisan voting bill. One measure that appears to have broader support is the Electoral Count Act, which would update an 1887 law whose loopholes enabled the Electoral College certification procedure that helped make Jan. 6, 2021, so chaotic. The act could potentially prevent GOP-dominated state legislatures from blocking presidential vote counts just because they don't like the election result.

Manchin and Sinema, along with several key Republicans, say they can support it.

The political impasse on Capitol Hill is real. Until the numbers change more to Democrats' favor, they will simply have to consider that half a loaf, or perhaps even just a quarter, is better than nothing at all.

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