Author’s Note: Here’s a freebie, but still consider becoming a paid subscriber for more content. This is a corrected edition, “vote-arama” not “vote-o-rama.”
I’ve been thinking about the term “Vote-arama.” It’s one of those bits of political jargon that seems built for cable news, catchy, colorful, but oddly hollow. It made me reflect on how much of our national political culture has developed its own language: insular, often opaque, and shaped by geography, class, and proximity to power.
The term “Beltway” technically refers to I-495, the highway encircling Washington, D.C. But culturally, it extends well beyond that, pulling in Northern Virginia, parts of South Central Maryland, and increasingly Baltimore, as housing costs rise and commutes stretch. More broadly, it often bleeds into what some call the Acela Corridor, the Northeast rail line that connects D.C. to New York and Boston—America’s financial and intellectual capitals. This corridor isn’t just infrastructure; it’s an engine room for political offices, thought leadership, and elite consensus.
It’s a world I know well. I grew up around prep schools, professional training programs, Jack and Jill conferences, and Vineyard vacations. I’ve seen skylines from the backseat of family road trips and the window of the Northeast Regional. These experiences shaped what I now think of as a class-coded memory bank, one that filters how I interpret the last several years of American life. That perspective offers clarity, but it also comes with blind spots.
Which brings me back to “Vote-arama.”
It’s a term few outside of D.C. culture would recognize, let alone use. But inside the Beltway, it marks a ritual, an all-night marathon of amendments, procedural maneuvers, and legislative theater. This week, it accompanied the passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a sweeping piece of legislation with profound implications for the economy, health care, and the social safety net.
The outcomes will touch millions of lives, particularly at the higher and lower ends of the income scale. Yet the language, the process, and the tone—all felt strangely detached. It felt like a pageant of procedure unfolding within a system that still governs real lives, yet speaks about them as if they were distant concepts.
That’s the tension. “Vote-arama” is more than a quirk of Senate rules; it’s a symbol of how disconnected national governance has become from the public it serves. It’s a spectacle that makes policy feel performative and remote, especially to those outside the Gilded Fortress of Washington's professional political culture.
And while many people in that culture care deeply and work hard, the system itself often struggles to connect with those who are not already fluent in its rituals. It’s an insufficient model for educating the public, and an even weaker one for rebuilding trust in democratic institutions.
So yes, pray for the good people of America, not because they’re helpless, but because they deserve a political culture that takes them seriously. They deserve more than jargon and ceremony.
They deserve clarity, consequence, and connection.
