The Senate Republicans still can't pass a budget, and the 26 judicial nominees on whom both parties have signed off remain unconfirmed. But as the Republican leaders on Capitol Hill and in the White House see it, the chief duty of Congress is to frighten the religious right to the polls in November. And so we have the constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages, which the Senate is to vote on today. It won't pass or come anywhere close. Like all constitutional amendments, the measure requires a two-thirds vote in each house of Congress. The Senate, as all its members know full well, is no more likely to come up with 67 votes for this bit of campaign-year demagoguery than it is to enact workers' and peasants' soviets. It's not just liberals but also centrists and conservatives (Lynne Cheney among them) who oppose placing a ban on gay marriage and possibly civil unions in the Constitution. But then, the amendment is being offered today simply because it will help the scare...

The most remarkable thing about John Kerry's selection of John Edwards as his running mate is that Kerry was actually responding to the wishes of his party. Across the nation over the past several months, there was a groundswell of support among Democrats for adding Edwards to the ticket -- a groundswell unprompted by any organization or distinct constituency within the party. And this was something new under the sun. Vice-presidential options don't engender groundswells. I cannot think of a single instance in 20th-century American politics -- certainly not since the first election of Franklin Roosevelt -- when ordinary members of one of the two major parties coalesced around a vice-presidential pick before the presidential candidate did. Specific elites, to be sure, have had their preferences. In 1944, the Democratic Party bosses in major cities came together to urge Roosevelt to dump incumbent Vice-President Henry Wallace in favor of Harry Truman. But coming together to oppose an...