With the baby steps the Democratic Party’s taken toward a more economically progressive, pro-working-class politics over the last two years, it shouldn’t be forgotten that this is still a corrupt, out-of-touch party divorced from any such tradition. And with his loss in the 2020 Democratic primary, it’s easy to forget the value of Bernie Sanders’s continuing presence in American political life, especially the US Senate.

Yet the events of the past twenty-four hours should serve as reminders of both.

For the past week or so, Congress has been consumed by the prospect of a looming and potentially monumentally disruptive strike by railworkers, who have spent three years negotiating with rail carriers for a better contract, centered on their lack of rights to take paid time off work if they fall ill. After four unions representing more than half of the unionized rail workforce rejected a deal put together by President Joe Biden’s White House and a panel of experts that didn’t do enough to fix these grievances, labor secretary Marty Walsh and, eventually, congressional leaders themselves pushed for congressional intervention to end the stalemate, effectively by forcing railworkers to accept the deal anyway ― in the process, stripping the workers of leverage in negotiations. The whole episode came to a head yesterday.