redistricting
The Missouri Supreme Court did not run for Congress, campaign for a seat, or submit itself to a single contested voter. Last week it paused the state's newly drawn congressional map anyway — the one the legislature passed this year to convert a competitive district into a safe Republican
separation of powers
By the first week of September 2026, none of the twelve annual appropriations bills has reached the President's desk, and the fiscal year ends in three weeks. This is not a crisis. It is Tuesday. The last time Congress passed all twelve on time, Bill Clinton was finishing
Social Security
My father kept his Social Security statements in the same drawer as his union card, and once a year he'd lay the new one on the kitchen table next to the old ones and do the arithmetic himself, out loud, distrusting the government's math on principle.
student loans
The letter went out at the end of June, on Department of Education stationery, to roughly seven million borrowers enrolled in a repayment plan called SAVE. It gave them ninety days to pick something else. SAVE was itself only a few years old, built by executive rule under the Biden
Social Security
The 2026 Trustees Report landed in May with the usual weather-report indifference: the combined Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund now runs dry in 2032, six years from this column, one year earlier than last year's estimate. Almost nobody outside actuarial circles read past the press release. That
immigration
The question came from the bench in the flat, unhurried tone judges use when they already suspect the answer will not survive the asking. An Obama appointee, hearing a challenge to the administration's immigration halt, wanted to know something a lot of soccer fans had wondered without the
Article I
The tariff schedule sitting on an importer's desk this month runs to thousands of line items, and every rate on it traces back to a single statute Congress passed in 1977 to freeze the assets of hostile foreign governments. Nobody in that Congress imagined a president using the