Essays

The brief for this piece arrived as an insult, the way most briefs for pieces like this one arrive: angry idiots are ruining the nation. I am not going to argue with the insult. I am going to argue that the word inside it is the more interesting half, and that it says something the anger does not. Because idiot is a political word. It always has been. The Greeks did not mean by it what we mean. To an Athenian, the idiōtēs was not a man of low intelligence. He was a private person, a man who held no public office and took no part in public affairs, as opposed to the magistrate and the citizen who did (Harper, 2026). The word comes from idios: one’s own, private, particular to oneself. The idiot was the man who stayed home. The idiot was the man who thought the city was somebody else’s business. ...

Question: How stupid can a person be and still be elected to the United States Senate from Missouri? Answer: Stupider than Eric Schmitt, and that is the interesting part, because he is not stupid. The interesting part is that nothing in the law required him to be anything at all. On Tuesday, September 29, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters” (Senate Judiciary Committee, 2026). A hearing that names its conclusion in the title is not an inquiry, and this one proceeded accordingly. Missouri’s junior senator spent his question time building an accusation of perjury against the former special counsel, and the accusation collapsed in public, on the record, within the same seven minutes in which it was made. ...

Before the Missouri Board of Cosmetology and Barber Examiners In the Matter of the Application of Eric Schmitt for Licensure as a United States Senator Docket No. 2026-09-30-SEN-001 HEARING OFFICER: Good morning. This is the public hearing on the application of Eric Schmitt for licensure as a United States Senator from the State of Missouri. The applicant is present. Mr. Schmitt, you have filed a sworn statement that you meet the qualifications set forth in the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 3, Clause 3. Is that correct? ...

On November 3 the country votes, and the most probable outcome, on the current arithmetic, is that one chamber changes hands and the other does not. That is the forecast this site published when the midterms were ten weeks out, and if it holds, the next two years will be conducted under divided government. So the question worth asking now is not who wins. It is what divided government actually accomplishes. ...

The question arrives every election season, and it usually arrives as a taunt: which party is better for the economy? For seventy years the honest answer has been that the data seem to favor one side, and the argument has therefore been about whether the data mean anything. That argument deserves care, because the strongest evidence for the claim and the strongest reasons to doubt it come from the same study, and that study’s own conclusion is not the one either side quotes. ...

Question: Six weeks from Election Day, after the Cook Political Report called control of the Senate a true coin flip and moved three races toward the Democrats, with the national generic ballot at its widest Democratic margin of the cycle and Kansas now polling like a race either party can win, is the majority still a Republican-held map, or has it become the toss-up the professionals now describe? Answer: It is a toss-up, and this week the professionals said so in writing. Jessica Taylor’s September 23 analysis for Cook put control at “a true coin flip” with “viable paths for both parties,” and gave her own range as a Democratic net gain of one to five seats against the four they need.1 Three races moved toward the Democrats in the same piece: Georgia to likely Democratic, Kansas to lean Republican, and South Carolina to likely Republican.1 The national numbers moved with them. NBC News released polling averages on September 25 that put the Democrats nine points ahead on the generic ballot, their widest lead of the cycle, with the president at 39 percent approval and independents favoring a Democratic Congress by sixteen.2 Kalshi’s own desk had the Democrats at 61 percent to take both chambers on September 22, with its “blue wave” contract up more than nine points in a single week.34 ...

I keep three federal dockets open, and I check them twice a day. That sentence needs defending, because it sounds like a hobby. It is not, or not only. Two of the three cases ask a question the same in kind, and it is the question that has mattered most in American law for four years: when a statute tells the executive branch to do something, what happens when the executive branch declines? ...

There is a kind of lawsuit that is not really a lawsuit about law at all. It is a lawsuit about whether the government will do the thing it said it would do. Phang v. Blanche is one of those, and it is worth following not because the legal question is hard, but because the legal question is easy and the government has spent five months finding ways not to answer it. ...

There is a habit in political writing of treating a document as a symbol. Project 2025 has been a symbol for two years now, which means most of what has been written about it is about what it stands for rather than what it says. That is a loss, because the document is unusually specific, it is public, and it can be checked. So let me do something unglamorous. Let me consider the source. ...

I want to make two claims, and I want to keep them apart, because collapsing them is how this argument usually fails. Theocrats are delusional. Theocrats are dangerous. Those are not two ways of saying the same thing, and each needs its own evidence. Let me define the term first, because I am using it more broadly than a dictionary will. A theocrat, as I mean it, is not only someone who wants a formal church-run state. It is anyone who claims a divine warrant for the use of state power: the man who says God requires the law to read one way, and equally the man who says America is a Christian nation and its law should reflect that. The American figures I discuss below mostly take the second position rather than the first, and the most careful of them meet the theocracy charge head-on rather than dodging it. Reno, whose essay I engage in full, raises the worry himself and answers it with Pilate. I apply the word anyway, because the thing that makes this politics dangerous is not the constitutional form its adherents prefer. It is the warrant they claim, and that claim is the same in both cases. ...