At the start of 2021, in the early weeks of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, no one in government was talking about vaccine mandates — because the only problem then was millions of folks clamoring to get the jab.

By late September, with hospitalizations and deaths resurgent from the delta variant, President Joe Biden announced “our patience is wearing thin” with the millions of unvaccinated Americans. His administration mandated vaccines in the health care field, the federal government and elsewhere, and told employers with more than 100 employees their workers needed to get a jab or get tested weekly.

There was major pushback.

This week, deadlines arrived — but the predicted nightmare scenarios did not. Reporters in Massachusetts learned that so far only one trooper has resigned rather than get the shot. New York State saw a surge of last-minute jabs that brought the vaccination rate of its hospital workers to 92%, and probably higher than that as thousands of others raced to get their first shot and save their job.

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake noted that “the evidence also increasingly suggests that [a mandate] spurs that vast majority of the resistant ultimately to comply, hard feelings or not.”

In other words, the tribal-unity politics and bluster about compulsory health measures seem to melt away when the price is losing one’s livelihood.

Officials reported this weekend the number of new U.S. COVID-19 cases is down 27% from two weeks ago.

The vaccine-mandate moment stands out in a United States that seems otherwise paralyzed by political gridlock and indecision. On Capitol Hill, the fate of Biden’s $450 billion-a-year economic agenda sits currently in limbo.

It’s easy to look at the success of vaccine mandates as a respite from all the other bad news. I’d argue what’s just happened should instead offer our political leaders a valuable lesson on the path forward.

Forced by an emergency of rising death rates and jammed ICU units, the vaccine mandates involved a tough and politically wrenching decision, but — as courts have repeatedly found — they were a legal exercise of governmental (or corporate) authority.

It’s time for the Democrats who currently have legitimate control of federal policy making to begin showing decisiveness around the other virus that is running rampant through our political system. That’s the threat to democracy posed by the new authoritarian streak in the Donald Trump-led Republican Party.

Most or all of the Democrats on Capitol Hill support an array of legislation that would reign in the worst voting rights abuses that are currently burning through America’s state capitols. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would not only restore but strengthen the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was gutted by our current right-wing Supreme Court. The For the People Act — which has also passed the House but remains filibustered in the Senate — tackles an array of good-government scandals and would boost voting rights. More recently and perhaps most importantly, there is a push to dramatically reform and update the Electoral Count Act of 1887, to limit the kind of shenanigans by Congress or state lawmakers that nearly led to a coup on Jan. 6.

These bills are gridlocked because of a) modern abuse of the filibuster, which now essentially requires 60 of the 100 votes for any major non-budgetary legislation and b) the shut-it-all-down philosophy of today’s GOP, which was never anticipated by the Founders. Unless Democrats act swiftly to end the filibuster, they will helplessly watch the virus of right-wing authoritarianism overtake the lungs of American democracy — another needless, avoidable death.

Like the vaccine mandates, ending the filibuster is a perfectly legal and legitimate use of authority by Congress.

Will Bunch is national columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.