Civics

I owe you a plain statement of what I mean by failure, because the word does a great deal of work and I do not want it to do more than I intend. A state is a human instrument. It is not a nation, not a culture, not a church, and not the sum of a people. It is a machine that is built, in the words of the American preamble that I have spent years defending, to secure the blessings of liberty for those who live inside it. Judged by that purpose, a state succeeds when the people subject to it can imagine a better life for their children than the one they inherited, and it fails when they cannot. This essay is an argument that the Russian state, as it is presently constituted, has failed at that task by almost every measure that matters. It is also an argument, and I want to be unambiguous about this, that the failure belongs to the state and the system, not to the Russian people, who are its victims and not its authors. ...

President Trump established a committee of inquiry to investigate whether Federal Reserve Governor Lisa D. Cook made false statements “in connection with one or more mortgage instruments,” and to tell him whether there is cause to remove her from the Board of Governors. The memorandum, signed October 7 and published this morning at 91 FR 65435, rests on the President’s Article II power to see that the laws are faithfully executed, “including by firing subordinates who cannot be trusted to tell the truth and follow the law,” and asks the committee to report whether cause exists “within the meaning of 12 U.S.C. 242, as construed in Trump v. Cook, 146 S. Ct. 2234 (2026).” The committee will hold a closed, transcribed hearing at the White House on November 5 and last no more than four hours. Cook is to appear and be examined by the committee, its representatives, and Justice Department personnel, may submit a written position statement three days before, and may file a post-hearing statement by November 10. Its members are the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, the Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Director of the Office of Government Ethics. The 10-year Treasury note yielded 5.204 percent at 7:00 a.m. Eastern this morning, and the Treasury’s own curve put the 30-year at 5.56 percent on October 13. ...

The midterms come Tuesday, November 3, and the single most consequential fact about them is not a candidate, a poll, or a map. It is that most eligible Americans will not vote. In 2022, the closest thing the country has seen to a high-turnout midterm in generations, 52.2 percent of the citizen voting-age population cast a ballot.1 By the stricter measure that counts only the voting-eligible population, turnout was 46 percent.2 Either way, the majority stayed home. In 2014 the number was worse: 41.9 percent by the census count, and just 36.4 percent of eligible voters by the elections-project measure, the lowest since 1942, a year when a large share of the country’s eligible voters were overseas fighting a world war.13 The largest bloc in American politics is not a party and not a movement. It is the empty seat. ...

President Trump announced on Sunday that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy ceasefire,” effective immediately, and by Tuesday the announcement had bought less than two days of quiet. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said Russia struck six Ukrainian energy facilities in the hours after the truce was declared, injuring 33 people, and he told Fox News the timing was “Putin’s answer to President Trump.” On Monday evening a drone hit a 25-story residential building in Kyiv’s Darnytskyi district, killing one person and injuring 11, the capital’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Ukraine does not deserve the “respite” a ceasefire would bring. The same day, drones struck two merchant ships off Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, one of them sinking with 11 crew members missing, and Bulgaria, a NATO member, summoned Russia’s ambassador. Oil fell on the news: West Texas Intermediate traded at $91.83 a barrel, down 2.04 percent, as of 6:50 a.m. Eastern. ...

The Republican Party has been called many things this year, and almost none of them by its own members. A cult of personality. A revenge machine. A rubber stamp. A party that lost its way. The metaphors are all attempts to describe the same spectacle: a governing majority that has become, in practice, a single man’s instrument, and that defends the arrangement with the vocabulary of loyalty rather than the vocabulary of policy. ...

Monday is Columbus Day, a federal holiday, and the American government has gone quiet for it: the Federal Register published nothing across the window this report reads, Sunday and Monday together, and the federal courts filed nothing either. The movement was abroad. The Houthi campaign against Saudi Arabia reached a pitch the war has not shown before. By Anadolu’s tally of official statements, ten strikes hit five Saudi airports between October 5 and October 11, killing 20 people and wounding hundreds. Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport took the worst of it. A missile strike there on Saturday killed 13 and wounded 309, which the Associated Press called the deadliest attack in a Gulf Arab nation since the war began; the civil aviation authority first counted 12 dead, and the toll rose when an injured Indian national died of his wounds on Sunday. The same field was struck again, and the Saudi-led coalition said air defenses intercepted a cruise missile near the airport, a ballistic missile aimed at Khamis Mushait, and a drone in the Eastern Province. Riyadh’s schools moved to distance learning for the week, and the oil market noticed: West Texas Intermediate traded at $92.76 a barrel, up about a percent, before the American cash session opened. ...

On November 3, Missourians will answer five statewide questions. Four are constitutional amendments referred by the legislature; one is a referendum the people forced onto the ballot themselves. Two of them are about the machinery of voting rather than about any policy a vote would produce, and that is the quiet feature of this ballot. Before the state decides who governs, it is being asked to decide how much of the deciding the people get to keep. ...

On Saturday an American fighter struck the stern of a Panama-flagged cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman with a precision munition, disabling its propulsion after, by Central Command’s account, the crew ignored repeated warnings and tried to run the blockade of Iran’s ports. The command’s statement on Sunday also totaled the campaign: since the blockade resumed on July 14, four commercial vessels have been put out of action, 135 ships have been turned back, and ten tankers tied to the Revolutionary Guard’s shadow oil network have been destroyed. The ship, the Ocean Molica, also sails as the Arika Sun, and nobody aboard was hurt. The operation drew criticism from at least one senator, Chris Murphy, a Democrat, who questioned what purpose the campaign serves. Everything else in the American government was quiet. The Federal Register published nothing across the two days, the courts filed nothing, and a five-day deadline the President set on October 5 for relief from the diesel excise tax passed on Saturday with no determination that this report can find. ...

Question: Twenty-three days from Election Day the professionals moved in one direction without exception, and the money moved the other way, so which of them should a reader believe? Answer: Both, because they are answering different questions. Ten rating changes landed this week across five forecasters, and every one of them moved toward the Democrats.1234 Cook Political Report revised its estimate of Democratic pickups upward to two to six seats and called Kansas “Democrats’ Cinderella story of the cycle.”15 Sabato’s Crystal Ball moved Alaska out of its toss-up column and then wrote the sentence that will be quoted until November: “For the first time all cycle, Republicans now need to win more of our Toss-ups to hold the Senate than Democrats need to win in order to flip it.”2 ...

Question: When the government asks two courts to decide a case on the record it has chosen, what happens if both courts answer that the record is not finished? Answer: They order more. On October 9, Judge Christopher Cooper refused to close discovery in the Kennedy Center case, extended it two weeks to October 23, and directed the Board to produce three things it had resisted: the FY 2026 financial statements, the text messages, and any non-privileged document showing that the Chairman’s February 1 announcement affected the votes the Board cast in August and September. The same day, Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the Justice Department to produce the underlying handwritten FBI interview notes it had declined to furnish in redacted form, by noon on October 16. Two days earlier, Cooper ordered the unsealing of the 163-page JLL Plan on which the Board relies to justify the closure. And in the third docket, the D.C. Circuit, where the government wants both questions settled for good, let its October 9 dispositive-motions deadline pass with nothing filed and its stay motion still undecided eleven days after the last brief landed. ...