This news week will surely go down in history: Attempted assassination! VP nominee JD Vance! Classified documents case dismissed! Biden has COVID! So it’s entirely understandable if a story about the Democratic National Committee (DNC) holding a rules meeting didn’t exactly grab your attention.

You may have seen references to the DNC's extremely unusual and controversial plan to formally nominate Joe Biden as the 2024 Democratic nominee via Zoom call, weeks before the scheduled party convention. Amid everything going on, it may turn out to be the most important story of the week — maybe of the election.

The story begins with yet another partial failure of one of our democratic rituals. Ohio law requires that the secretary of State be notified of candidate nominations at least 90 days before each election. Every presidential election year, this poses a problem because, by longstanding arrangement, one major party holds its convention in July and the other in August and thus risks missing the dealine. So each time, the Ohio legislature passes a law extending the deadline until September. It’s very much a tradition, and it’s been happening, like clockwork, for decades.

But this year, instead of passing a clean bill........

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