Politics

Carl Sagan died in December 1996. He never saw a smartphone. He never saw social media. He never saw a large language model generate a confident lie on demand. He never saw a calendar year pass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above the pre-industrial level, because that year, 2024, was still twenty-eight years away. And yet the question of what he would say about today’s world is not idle curiosity. It is a way of asking what the evidence demands of us, and he spent his life teaching us how to ask exactly that question. He would recognize this moment. He spent thirty years warning that it was coming. The most useful thing we can do is listen to what he said, because he said it all before, and he said it with the evidence in his hand. ...

Ninety Days From Today Count it out on a calendar. Ninety days from this morning is December 2. Between here and there sit a Federal Reserve meeting on September 16, a midterm election on November 3, and another Fed meeting in early December. That is the window this article is about: one quarter of a year in which the world’s largest bond market has to price a war that shows no sign of ending. ...

Public corruption is conventionally discussed in moral terms: integrity, trust, the character of public life. Those concerns are real, and an earlier essay, Corruption at the Summit, addressed them on constitutional grounds. Corruption is, however, also an economic event, with a price, a transmission mechanism, and a payer. The payer is neither the official who accepts the favor nor the magnate who purchases it. The payer is everyone else. The argument of this essay is that public corruption functions as a tax that no legislature ever enacted: it misallocates capital, raises the cost of borrowing, diminishes the revenue the state can collect, and erodes the voluntary trust on which every modern economy depends. None of these effects requires an assumption that anyone has committed a crime. Much of the corruption that matters most is perfectly legal, and that is precisely what makes it expensive. ...

Ninety Days From Today This article is the companion to one I published this morning about the bond market’s next ninety days. Same calendar, same premise, different victim. Ninety days from this morning is December 2. Between here and there sit a Federal Reserve meeting on September 16, a midterm election on November 3, and another Fed meeting in early December. The bond article argued that the window prices a war that shows no sign of ending. This one asks what that window does to the stock market, and the honest answer is: something the index’s current price barely contemplates. ...

Sixty-one days from now, on November 3, Americans will vote in a midterm election: all 435 seats of the House of Representatives, 35 seats of the Senate, and thousands of state and local offices. Most of us will vote without ever asking a question the Constitution answers in surprising and incomplete ways: what does the document actually say about federal elections? The answer is less than most people assume, and more. The original Constitution never mentions a right to vote for president, and barely mentions elections at all. What it does contain is a carefully engineered division of power over election machinery, a method for choosing a president that has been amended four times, and a counting procedure whose ambiguities were tested on January 6, 2021 and rewritten by statute a year later. This article walks through the text, clause by clause, because sixty-one days before a midterm is a good time to know exactly what is written down and what is not. ...

Kansas Senate 2026: The Case for Adam Hamilton Question: Why would anyone in Kansas, a state that has not elected a Democratic senator since 1932, support a first-time candidate who is a Methodist pastor? Answer: Because I attended his church before COVID-19, and I know what he is capable of. Because the man running against him has spent five years voting with the president 98% of the time and answering to Washington instead of Kansas. And because this race, against every expectation, is suddenly competitive. ...

Question: How do Democrats get from 47 seats to a Senate majority in 2026, and who would be the Majority Leader if they do? Answer: They need a net gain of four seats, because a 50-50 tie belongs to the vice president, and the vice president is a Republican. The map gives them a real shot: one likely pickup in North Carolina, two coin flips in Ohio and Texas, and a bench of competitive races from Maine to Alaska. If the defense holds and the flips land, the Majority Leader is almost certainly Chuck Schumer, and the real fight is over who succeeds him. ...

The National Emergencies Act of 1976 was written to be a leash. Congress, tired of four decades of unexamined emergency powers, demanded that every declaration name its statutory basis, be reported to the legislature, and lapse unless renewed each year. The whole design assumed that emergencies would be rare, and that rarity would be the check. Eighteen months into the second Trump administration, the leash has become a rubber stamp. Twelve new national emergencies have been declared since January 2025: for the border, for cartels, for energy, for tariffs on Canada, Mexico, China, Brazil, and the world, for the ICC, for Venezuela, for Cuba, for the bulk-power grid. Twelve emergencies, and not one of them was an emergency in any ordinary sense of the word. They were vehicles. ...

The National Emergencies Act of 1976 was supposed to be a leash. Congress, alarmed by four decades of unexamined emergency powers, required that every future declaration name its statutory basis, be reported to Congress, and lapse automatically unless renewed each year.1 Fifty years later, the leash has stretched into something closer to a routine: as of late October 2025, 48 national emergencies were active in the United States, and President Trump was responsible for 11 of them.2 By the end of August 2026, the number of new declarations from his second term alone had reached twelve, with two more carried over from his first term still on the books.3 ...

The 2026 midterms come Tuesday, November 3, with both chambers of Congress in play and an outcome that has become genuinely uncertain as the campaign enters its final stretch.1 Republicans control the Senate 53 to 47 and the House 219 to 212, with four seats vacant.2 Democrats enter the fall with the national wind at their back, roughly six points ahead on the generic ballot, and a plausible arithmetic for taking both chambers.3 The question is whether they survive contact with the map. ...