The Supreme Court killed what was left of the Voting Rights Act on Wednesday. Here is what congressional Democrats did. Schumer launched a task force. Jeffries told a reporter the answer was better candidate recruitment. Others think that promoting another piece of legislation will be the answer to the problem.

So let me tell you about three people who had a different answer.

Thaddeus Stevens. Charles Sumner. Ben Wade. They did not run the Republican party in the 1860s — they were a faction inside it, outnumbered by its moderates and winning the votes anyway. Andrew Johnson, the white supremacist accidental president, was pardoning rebel officials by the tens of thousands and watching Southern legislatures pass Black Codes that put freed people back into something close to slavery. Every challenge to Reconstruction was heading toward a Supreme Court whose Dred Scott decision was barely a decade old. Stevens, Sumner, and Wade refused to treat the federal judiciary as a fixed object. Between 1866 and 1869, the faction they led drove three structural moves through Congress: a reduction in the size of the Court that denied Johnson any appointments, a redrawing of the federal circuits that broke the South’s hold on the appellate bench, and a stripping of jurisdiction that yanked a Reconstruction challenge off the Supreme Court’s docket while it was being decided.

The tools they used are still in Article III.