Essays
Judgment / September 13, 2026
Every few years Washington rediscovers the recess appointment, and every few years the same tired theater plays out. The party in power discovers that the...
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Every election season, the same line returns. Citizens United sold the republic to billionaires, turned corporations into people, and equated money with...
There is a constitutional time bomb sitting quietly in the second and third spots of the presidential line of succession, and almost no one in Washington...
There is a sentence in the Constitution that could do more to restore self-government than a hundred new laws, and almost no one talks about it. Article IV...
Nearly everyone invokes the social contract. Hardly anyone actually reads it. That is how a theory built to restrain government turned into a rhetorical...
Every confirmation fight in Washington is fought over one word: consent. The other word, advice, has been treated as a constitutional typo, a bit of...
Every few years, a familiar panic grips American politics: theocracy is coming. Depending on the decade, the threat is a Catholic president, a Baptist...
The most dangerous sentence in American politics is also its most popular: everyone has a right to vote. It sounds generous. It is an intellectual error...
Religious liberty is the first freedom named in the Bill of Rights, and for most of my lifetime the courts have managed to read one half of that protection...
Most commentary on Russian politics starts in the wrong place. It opens with elections: how many parties qualified for the ballot, how many candidates were...