Essays

This morning I published a ranking of all fifty-six Speakers of the House, built on a rubric I stated in full: tenure, legislative output, institutional change, each graded zero to four, summing to twelve, emitted as a three-digit profile string so anyone can attack the arithmetic. In that table, Mike Johnson is twenty-seventh, with a profile of 220 and a score of four out of twelve. I put the number in the paper because I believed it. I stand by the method. And I want to use this space to say plainly that the number is close to worthless as a statement about the man, that the reason is a specific defect in my own rubric, and that the defect has a shape I should have seen before I shipped it. ...

The report the court ordered arrived at the end of the day, and it is a real document: six pages of narrative supported by a six-page sworn declaration from Matt Floca, the Kennedy Center’s executive director and chief operating officer, filed under 28 U.S.C. § 1746. It describes hazards that are not trivial. It also answers a smaller question than the one Judge Cooper asked. This is a follow-up to Sealed on the Record, which covered the September 18 motions and the sealed exhibit they rest on. Here I want to take the new filing on its own terms, because the most important sentence in it is not about a hazard at all. ...

The government owed the court a sworn report today. What it filed on Friday was a request that the case be over, resting on a document the public is not allowed to read. This is a follow-up to The Kennedy Center Deadline and to The Name Over the Door. The argument in both is unchanged. What is new is a procedural move that puts the case’s two halves in direct contradiction. What was due today Judge Cooper’s September 17 minute order denied the plaintiff’s emergency request for a hearing and told the defendants to file, by today, a “detailed status report, supported by a sworn declaration from a knowledgeable representative of the Kennedy Center,” on the “temporary closure” and the emergency repairs (Minute Order, 2026). ...

Nearly every comparison of Barack Obama and Donald Trump is really a verdict on two men, and the verdict is usually the one the reader walked in with. Ask whether the forty-fourth president was better than the forty-fifth and you learn nothing you did not already believe. There is a comparison underneath that one, and it is more interesting, because it can be decided with evidence instead of affiliation. Both men held the same office, inherited the same accumulated powers, and operated the same machinery. What differed was what each of them said about his own right to use it, and whether he left behind a standard by which he could be judged. ...

He will not let the building be repaired unless his name goes on it. That is not a characterization. It is his own sentence, posted on September 15, 2026: the renovation “cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board’s approved name,” and if the ruling goes against him and the Supreme Court does not reverse it, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place” (Truth Social, 2026). To reporters the next day he was more explicit. “For me to get involved, and to take on long term, and to carry it, I think the Trump administration should certainly have recognition,” he said. “Because frankly, if we don’t do that, it’s going to close. It’ll end up being ripped down” (AP, 2026). ...

On Friday, September 18, the government filed two motions that change the shape of the Kennedy Center case. On Wednesday, September 23, it owes the court a sworn accounting. This is a short update to The Name Over the Door. The argument there is unchanged. What has changed is who is defending what. What the board did The board has fought this in two directions at once. It moved for a stay so the President’s name could go back over the door; the D.C. Circuit refused on July 8, holding that the government had asserted financial harm “without any specific facts or evidence” and that the removal had already happened anyway (D.C. Circuit, 2026). It has also taken the underlying judgment itself up on appeal. ...

Peter, I am writing this in the open because you have never hidden what you think, and what you think deserves an answer longer than a post. I have read you for years, not the caricature but the actual essays. The Education of a Libertarian is the clearest thing you have ever written, and I want to begin by saying the thing almost no one who disagrees with you is willing to say. ...

Question: Seven weeks out, with Kansas handing Adam Hamilton his first independent lead of the cycle, Kalshi’s own desk reporting the Democrats at a record 57 percent for the Senate, and the pollsters calling Minnesota, Michigan, and New Hampshire all closer than the models do, is the majority closer than it was a week ago? Answer: The models and the markets moved decisively Democratic this week, and this time the forecasters moved a little with them. Kalshi’s Senate-control market crossed to the Democrats on September 14 and Kalshi’s own desk put them at a record 57 percent by September 17, their first extended Democratic price since April, with Polymarket sitting near the same number.1 Nate Silver’s FLIPR model rose from 50.6 percent on September 6 to 58.6 on September 14 and into the low sixties by the weekend, and Decision Desk HQ’s simulation ended the week with a median 51-49 Democratic Senate.23 The forecasters who do not model moved only twice, and both times toward a toss-up: Cook made New Hampshire one on September 15, and Inside Elections made Maine one on September 17.4 The ground moved with the models: the first independent survey of the cycle put Hamilton ahead in Kansas,5 Minnesota went dead even,6 El-Sayed opened his largest Michigan lead of the cycle,7 and Florida’s special election tied in a poll the Moody campaign answered with an emergency fundraising alert.8 ...

The President of the United States kept the National Symphony Orchestra out of its own building because he could not get his name onto the front of it. That is the sentence. Everything else in this essay is evidence. Not context, not nuance: evidence, for a claim that should not need arguing but apparently does, which is that the most powerful man in the world has spent nineteen months holding a national memorial hostage over a sign. ...

If you read the news about the 2026 election long enough, you come away with the impression that something enormous is about to happen to it. Two executive orders, a Postal Service rule, a citizenship database, a hundred lawsuits, agents at polling places, a Supreme Court case about mail ballots. It reads like an election under siege. Here is the strangest fact about all of it: as of the end of September, almost nothing has actually changed for voters. The executive orders are blocked. The Postal Service rule was denied by the Supreme Court nine days before the deadline to mail overseas ballots. The citizenship database is under challenge in Maryland. The Justice Department has lost every voter-roll case that has been decided, twenty-four of them in a row. The SAVE Act never passed. The Election Assistance Commission cannot adopt new standards because it has no commissioners left to vote.1 ...