Essays
Judgment / September 24, 2026
The most important vote in the United States Senate is not on the bill. It is on whether the Senate will allow itself to talk about the bill at all. Ask...
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Most budget coverage is aimed at the wrong target. It follows the trillion-dollar top line, the reconciliation instructions, the floor speeches, and the...
Most people hear the phrase "motion to table" and assume the Senate has decided to set a bill or amendment aside for later consideration. That assumption is...
Everyone argues about what the Congressional Black Caucus demands. Almost no one asks the prior question. Why does the people's House of a constitutional...
Public office is a trust, not a trading desk. That principle is why the idea of banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks sounds so...
Most Americans have been taught that the Fourth Amendment is a privacy amendment. The truth is stranger and more useful: the text never mentions privacy. It...
Most of what Washington calls fiscal discipline is really accounting theater. The statutory PAYGO scorecard is Exhibit A. The 2010 law sounds serious. It...
The phrase "we are a republic, not a democracy" gets thrown around constantly, and most of the time Aristotle gets dragged in as the ancient authority who...
You have been told for years that first-past-the-post is the boring, outdated way we run elections, and that serious people want to replace it with...
Let me say this plainly because Washington never will. A government shutdown is not the collapse of our constitutional order. It is the constitutional order...