The 119th Congress returned to the U.S. Capitol recently. They have an immense amount of work to get done, policy matters that they should have addressed last year. Top on the list is completing the federal budget process for the current fiscal year, which began on October 1, 2025. It has passed only six of […]
The congressional fight over the House S...
Now that a couple of weeks have passed and the noise has begun to subside, we can take a broader view of what McCarthy’s election suggests about Congress and the state of American politics. The media had it wrong: to equate Mr. McCarthy’s struggles to win the Speakership with political dysfunction is to grossly misunderstand […]
Conservatism’s enduring debates
Not quite thirty years ago, I sketched out a book-length history of the American political right. I had read and enjoyed George Nash’s and Jay Sigler’s tomes, but felt they were both a little dated and had excluded essential thinkers and developments. I also felt that academe, which I was in training to join, had given the […]
Is democratic debate dead?
In mid-January, the Senate convened to consider election reform legislation. Many years had passed since the “world’s greatest deliberative body” had formally taken up the issue. The chamber spent a little over a dozen hours on the matter, almost all of which were consumed by senators delivering monologues to a mostly empty chamber. Democrats name-checked […]