Politics

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. ...

This article examines the economic and geopolitical position of the United States as of mid-2026. It analyzes the recent deceleration in real output growth, the persistence of above-target inflation, and the trajectory of public indebtedness, and it relates these macroeconomic conditions to the country’s standing within the international system. The analysis concludes that the principal constraints on the American position are endogenous in origin: they derive from domestic fiscal decisions and from the attenuation of the legitimacy that underpins the country’s alliance relationships, rather than from the direct exercise of power by rival states. ...

Net interest on the federal debt is on pace to cross $1 trillion this fiscal year, more than the Pentagon spends, a gap the Congressional Budget Office says holds every year from 2025 through 2035 (CBO, 2025). And on the CBO’s own current baseline, the boring one, no crisis, no shock, no recession assumed, debt held by the public breaks the record set in 1946 at the height of World War II by fiscal year 2030 (CBO, 2026). That’s roughly four years out. Whatever actually fixes this needs to already be running by then, not still working its way through committee. ...

The Illusion of Control Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent frames the move as a liquidity measure for a thin summer bond market, not an attempt to suppress yields by fiat. Call it what you will: the mechanism is the same, the government stepping in to buy debt investors don’t want, at prices they wouldn’t otherwise pay. Bessent’s decision to double the debt buyback program is not a solution. It is a desperate gamble that will fail on contact with reality. The move is predicated on a dangerous illusion: that the U.S. Treasury can outmaneuver the bond market by sheer force of will. This is not fiscal policy; it is magical thinking dressed in bureaucratic jargon. ...

Steven Miller, I’m writing to you as a Stoic, an atheist, and a progressive: not to convert you, but to challenge you. I don’t share your faith, but I do share your humanity, and it’s on that common ground that I want to speak. My goal isn’t to mock or dismiss you, but to ask you to consider the consequences of your words and actions, and to reflect on whether they align with the values you claim to uphold. ...

I have spent years writing about honor as if it were an antique: a virtue our ancestors practiced and we merely study. Stoic biographies, civics essays, a shelf of books about how a person builds a defensible inner life. I used to think the point of that work was personal: how do I hold myself together when nobody’s watching? Lately I’ve had to sit with a second, less comfortable question underneath it. What happens to a country when the people running it stop asking that question at all? ...