American aircraft struck Iranian air defenses on Qeshm Island on Friday night, the first American attack since the midterm election, and the president described the action the same evening as minor and subordinate to a negotiation he said was advancing. “They built a little bit of an anti-aircraft device and we knocked it out in about 15 minutes, maybe five,” Donald Trump told reporters, and he insisted that “we are not fighting” while reporting “a lot of progress with Iran.” Iranian state media said two missiles hit the Suza area of the island and named neither the targets nor the damage; the Revolutionary Guard claimed to have shot down an American drone, a claim Washington did not confirm. Qatar, the chief mediator, denied reports that the talks had collapsed and said that “Qatari mediators remain in close coordination with the United States and Iran to support ongoing negotiations.” The strike came after voters returned a Democratic Congress, a result that officials and analysts have tied to disagreement with the war, and it follows a round of what the military called defensive strikes on Monday near Qeshm, Hengam and Bandar Abbas. A negotiation and a bombing campaign are again running in the same week, and the day gave no evidence of which would finish first.

The administration and the rule of law

The Federal Register carried 80 documents in the two-day window, all of them dated November 6. Nothing was printed on November 7, and the substantive items are the ones this report described yesterday: the two presidential documents, the Medicare hospital outpatient payment rule, the Homeland Security rule on foreign importers of record and the Labor Department’s apprenticeship rule. Beyond those, the window holds notices: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Fair Lending Report of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, six Homeland Security notices adjusting disaster-assistance amounts and per capita impact indicators, and information collections on polysilicon stockpiling and on the Section 232 adjustments to imports of specialty pharmaceuticals. The register’s quiet Saturday is the ordinary rhythm of the publication schedule, not a gap in the record.

The courts

The Supreme Court and the D.C. Circuit opinion feeds were silent again. The district court in Washington recorded twelve new entries on November 6, and four of them name health-care organizations against federal agencies: Banner Health against the Department of Health and Human Services, Elevance Health against the same department, Verda Healthcare against Kennedy and Community Memorial Hospital against the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The pack carries captions and docket numbers, not complaints, so this report can say who sued whom and not what the suits allege.

Of the five watched dockets, three moved. The Epstein-files case, MSW Media v. Department of Justice, recorded two entries on November 7: an opposition to the department’s motion for summary judgment and a cross-motion for summary judgment, the second with an exhibit the docket labels Leopold excerpts. Beatty v. Trump, the Kennedy Center matter, recorded entry 115 on November 6. D.C. Preservation League v. Department of the Interior, the East Potomac golf case, recorded entry 141 the same day. Phang v. Blanche in the district court and its appeal in the D.C. Circuit were silent.

Markets

Equities closed higher on November 6, one day after the selloff, with a split underneath. The S&P 500 finished at 7,376.86, up 23.13 points or 0.31 percent; the Nasdaq Composite at 24,579.425, up 264.427 or 1.09 percent; and the Dow Jones Industrial Average at 51,285.73, down 237.33 or 0.46 percent. The VIX was 25.64, down 2.54 or 9.01 percent.

The ten-year Treasury yielded 4.859 percent at 17:05 ET, up 2.2 basis points. Treasury’s curve for November 6 ran 4.51 percent at two years, 4.86 at ten and 5.26 at thirty, a 2s10s spread of +0.35 against +0.38 the day before; the short end rose five basis points, the ten-year two and the thirty-year one, a bear flattening. The dollar index was 102.279, up 0.732 or 0.72 percent. Gold was $4,079.50, down $34.00, and front-month WTI crude $90.34, down 18 cents, on the last prints the quote service held. Its stamps for those two read 18:13 on November 7, later than the hour this report was written, so they are carried-forward prints and not a live Saturday quote.

Total public debt outstanding was $40,556,120,784,984 on November 5, up $5,890,737,374 from the day before. Of that, $32,766,722,473,716 was held by the public and $7,789,398,311,268 was intragovernmental.

The economy

The October readings entered the labor series. Unemployment was 4.1 percent, a tenth below September; total nonfarm payrolls were 159,293 thousand, a gain of 165 thousand on September’s 159,128 thousand. That September level is 84 thousand above the one this report carried yesterday, a revision rather than a new month. Prices are still one month behind: the all-items consumer price index for September was 336.940 on the 1982-84 base, 1.96 points or 0.59 percent above August, and no October reading has been published. Taken together the three say hiring strengthened while unemployment fell, with the last price reading still firm. The next consumer price report will show whether the two move together.

Elections and the midterms

Both chambers are decided and the House count is still filling in. AP’s ledger, as displayed by the tracker at Votelect, had the House at 252 Democrats to 161 Republicans with 22 races uncalled as of 5:46 p.m. PT on November 6, and the Senate at 54 to 44 with two uncalled. In the day since this report’s last count, AP called eight more House races, three for the Democrats and five for the Republicans. The page’s own clock read 4:00 a.m. PT on November 7.

Mississippi remains the closer of the two Senate races and the one with the clearest calendar. AP’s count at 5:30 p.m. ET on November 6 had Scott Colom ahead by 2,498 votes, 49.1 percent to 48.8, with 953,222 votes counted, about 97 percent of the estimated total. Roughly 30,000 votes remained, including an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 provisional ballots whose eligibility counties must verify. Mailed ballots postmarked by November 3 must arrive by 5 p.m. on November 10, the same hour affidavit voters have to cure a missing ID; counties must certify their returns to the secretary of state by November 13, the state declares results on December 3, and Mississippi has no automatic recount.

Alaska will not be settled by the first-choice count. AP had Mary Peltola at 48.2 percent and Senator Dan Sullivan at 47.9, the race uncalled, and the count as of Wednesday afternoon, November 4, stood at 102,962 to 102,325, a margin of 637 votes with about a quarter of the ballots still out. Ranked tabulation begins November 18.

The markets have decided both. Polymarket had Peltola at 98.0 percent on $318,823 of twenty-four-hour volume against Sullivan at 2.1 percent on $252,030, and Colom at 99.4 percent on $113,959 against Hyde-Smith at 0.8 percent on $120,231. A board on the House popular-vote margin put a Democratic win of 14 to 16 points at 87.2 percent on $13,618, and the next majority leader contract put Chuck Schumer at 85.5 percent on $22,346. Those are the venue’s prices, not this report’s view. The Mississippi book is the clearest illustration of the difference: it has all but closed a race in which AP’s count leaves 2,498 votes and some 30,000 ballots between the leader and a result.

The world

Paraguay’s lawmakers impeached President Santiago Peña on Friday over the collapse of Ueno Bank, and he was placed under house arrest in Asunción and faced questioning on Saturday over alleged breach of trust, influence peddling and misappropriation of funds, prosecutors said. Vice President Pedro Alliana, 52, was sworn in the same day to serve until August 2028; lawmakers rejected proceedings against him.

The bank’s failure is the measure of the crisis: Euronews reported that it froze the savings of half the country’s adult population. A banking failure became a change of government inside a week, with the former president under arrest and his successor, a former national-team basketball player who led the Colorado Party and governed Ñeembucú before entering the Chamber of Deputies, taking office amid a financial panic. Alliana said on October 26 that loyalty should not be confused with blind obedience, a remark aimed at former president Horacio Cartes, who had called him the next president of the Republic in 2025. Cartes’s movement still controls the party. What happens to the depositors’ money is now the question on which the transition will be judged, and the account gave no timetable for repayment.

Sources

Market, yield, debt and prediction-market figures were collected at 06:00 CT on November 7, 2026 from CNBC’s quote service (the November 6 close for the equities and the VIX, and the service’s last prints for gold, crude and the dollar), the U.S. Treasury daily yield curve (November 6), FiscalData (November 5) and Polymarket’s Gamma API (twenty-four-hour volume). The BLS public API supplied the three series named above. Federal Register counts and document descriptions were read from the register’s own API, and the courts section draws on CourtListener’s RECAP search and the watched dockets’ own pages. The election counts draw on AP’s race calls as displayed by Votelect, on CNBC for Mississippi and on Alaska’s News Source for the first-choice count; the dates for Mississippi come from Edit USA’s summary. The account of the Iran strike and of Paraguay draws on Euronews.

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman