—

The United States Congress is the most powerful legislative body in the world on paper. Article I of the Constitution grants it the power to declare war, control the federal budget, regulate commerce, confirm judges, and legislate on virtually every question of national importance. It is the branch most directly accountable to voters, most frequently renewed through elections, and most structurally capable of reflecting the actual preferences of the American public across its 535 members.

It has spent the better part of a century giving that power away.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 was supposed to reclaim congressional authority over military force after Vietnam. Every president since Ford has functionally ignored it and Congress has never enforced it, meaning the United States has conducted military operations in countries and against groups with no connection to any congressional authorization for decades. Trade authority was systematically delegated to the executive through fast track legislation that stripped Congress of its Article I power to set tariffs, which is why the current administration’s tariff actions are constitutionally contested in the first place. The administrative state has expanded into a fourth branch of government that writes binding regulations with the force of law, and Congress has repeatedly chosen not to exercise its power under the Congressional Review Act to claw those regulations back. The budget process has been replaced by continuing resolutions and omnibus packages that allow members to avoid recorded votes on specific spending decisions while the national debt grows by two trillion dollars annually.

The pattern is consistent and bipartisan. Congress repeatedly encounters a hard problem, decides the political cost of resolving it is too high, and finds a mechanism to hand the decision to someone else. The executive branch, the regulatory agencies, and most consequentially the Supreme Court have all expanded their authority not primarily through power grabs but through vacuums that Congress created and declined to fill.

No example illustrates this more clearly or more consequentially than Roe v. Wade.

I want to be honest about my position before making the argument, because the argument requires separating two questions that the political debate almost never separates. I believe women have the right to make their own reproductive decisions. I also believe the Supreme Court was the wrong institution to be the permanent guardian of that right for fifty years, and that Congress’s failure to codify abortion protections into federal law during the five decades it had every opportunity to do so is one of the most significant governance failures in modern American history, and one that the political class on both sides bears direct responsibility for.

Roe was decided in 1973. Democrats controlled the House of Representatives continuously for the next twenty one years and the Senate for most of that period. They had unified government under Carter from 1977 to 1981, under Clinton briefly in 1993 and 1994, and under Obama with a filibuster proof Senate majority for a period in 2009 and 2010. The legislative codification of abortion rights was available in every one of those windows. The Affordable Care Act passed during that filibuster proof window in 2010. The legislative bandwidth existed. What did not exist was the political will to remove abortion as a mobilization issue, because a solved problem does not generate donations and turnout the way an existential threat does.

The Republican side of this equation is equally cynical in the opposite direction. Republican candidates and senators promised to overturn Roe for fifty years as a mobilization tool for their base, collected those votes reliably, and many privately had no interest in the governing chaos a post-Roe world would produce because a world where abortion is regulated by fifty different state legislatures is significantly messier and more politically costly than a world where the Court handles it and Congress can criticize from the sidelines.

Both parties spent fifty years treating the most contested social question in American life as a perpetual fundraising vehicle rather than a problem requiring legislative resolution. The people paying the price for that calculation were the women in states with the most restrictive laws and the providers facing criminal prosecution after Dobbs, and neither party has faced meaningful accountability for the fifty year abdication that created the situation.

The Supreme Court term limits bill that Democrats introduced this week is the latest version of the same pattern. The party that controlled the Senate for years and declined to codify abortion rights is now proposing to restructure the institution that resolved the question they refused to touch, using the same moral urgency language they deployed for fifty years while doing nothing. The party introducing that bill knows it will not pass. It is not designed to pass. It is designed to generate the same fundraising emails and base mobilization that Roe generated for a generation, now pointed at the Court rather than at the underlying policy question.

The honest argument about Supreme Court term limits is worth having on its own merits, separate from the current political packaging. There are legitimate reasons to think that lifetime appointments create incentive problems and that an 18-year term with staggered appointments would produce a more predictable and less politically charged confirmation process. But that argument requires acknowledging that the Court accumulated so much cultural and political power in the first place because Congress abdicated the field, and that restructuring the Court without rebuilding Congress’s willingness to do its actual job would simply shift the power vacuum to a different institution rather than filling it.

The question worth asking is not how to limit the Supreme Court’s power. It is why we built a governing system where the death of a single elderly lawyer in Washington can throw the entire country into existential political crisis, and whether the people responsible for building that system bear any accountability for the consequences. The answer to both questions points directly at the institution introducing the term limits bill, and at the one currently sitting at 10 percent approval while 90 percent of its members keep their seats.

—

Keir Starmer has an 18 percent approval rating. Three quarters of the British public view him unfavorably. His net favorability of negative 57 is the lowest recorded for any British Prime Minister in modern history except Liz Truss, who lasted 49 days in office. Starmer has been there 20 months.

The conventional explanation is that he is a bad communicator. That he promised change and delivered austerity. That his chancellor raised taxes. That he cut winter fuel payments to pensioners. That he accepted Taylor Swift tickets without declaring them. That he has no vision. All of that is true. None of it is the actual explanation.

To understand what is happening to Keir Starmer you have to understand what Britain actually is and how it got here.

For roughly 75 years after World War Two the United Kingdom operated inside one of the most favorable geopolitical environments in human history. The United States underwrote British security through NATO, which meant Britain did not have to spend its capital defending itself. The Royal Navy that once ruled the world's oceans was replaced by the US Seventh Fleet as the guarantor of global trade routes. Britain got access to American markets, American security guarantees, and American diplomatic cover while spending its own resources on something else entirely.

That something else was the welfare state.

The NHS. Comprehensive public housing. State pensions. Free university education that became subsidized university education. Winter fuel payments. Disability benefits. Unemployment insurance generous enough that participation in the workforce became genuinely optional for a growing portion of the population. Britain built one of the most comprehensive cradle to grave social systems in the developed world and it was genuinely popular because for a long time it was genuinely affordable.

The reason it was affordable is almost never discussed honestly. Britain did not build that welfare state on its own economic productivity. It built it on the difference between what it would have had to spend on security without the Americans and what it actually spent. That gap was enormous. Over decades it compounded. The welfare state was real but the accounting that made it sustainable was borrowed from a security subsidy that the British government never put on the books.

Now the Americans are renegotiating the terms. Not maliciously. Structurally. The United States no longer has the demographic or economic rationale for maintaining a global security umbrella that primarily benefits people who stopped contributing to it meaningfully forty years ago. Europe broadly and Britain specifically are being handed the bill for their own defense at exactly the moment when the industrial capacity to pay that bill has atrophied beyond quick repair.

Britain has not meaningfully grown its economy since 2008. Real wages have been flat or falling for nearly two decades. The pound buys less energy, less housing, less food than it did fifteen years ago. Energy costs are roughly two and a half times American levels. Home ownership has collapsed among people under 40. The NHS waiting lists stretched to seven million people before the pandemic and never recovered.

None of this is Starmer's fault in the sense that he created these conditions. He inherited every one of them. But here is what finished him politically. He ran on the premise that competent management could fix structural decline. He told voters the country was broken under the Conservatives and that Labour would rebuild it. He won a 174 seat parliamentary majority on that promise, the largest Labour victory since 1997. And then the structural reality arrived on his desk.

The inheritance tax on agricultural land that farmers who had voted Labour for the first time in their lives immediately turned against. The winter fuel payment cuts that landed on pensioners who had been told explicitly that Labour would protect them. The income tax increase that his own Chancellor prepared and then abandoned because it would have destroyed what remained of Labour's electoral coalition. The economic optimism index hitting its lowest level since 1978.

Starmer is not unpopular because he is personally uncharismatic, although he is. He is unpopular because he stood in front of the British people and told them that the problem was the last government, and the British people are beginning to understand that the problem is not the last government. The problem is that the prosperity they thought they had built over the last seventy five years was partly a subsidy they never accounted for and a security guarantee they never paid for.

The bill has arrived. Starmer is the one holding it.

Nigel Farage's Reform UK is currently projected to win 381 parliamentary seats in the next election with a majority of 112. Labour is projected to fall from 411 seats to 85. The Conservatives from 121 to 70. Britain is not turning to Farage because Farage has answers to structural demographic decline and a defense industrial base that has been hollowing out for forty years. Britain is turning to Farage because he is the only politician willing to say out loud that something has gone fundamentally wrong and that the two parties who presided over it for decades are not going to fix it.

That is not a political story. That is what the end of a seventy five year geopolitical arrangement looks like from the inside of a country that built its domestic politics on the assumption that arrangement was permanent.

It was not permanent. It never was. The Americans just stopped pretending otherwise.

—

Something significant is happening in British politics right now and almost nobody in America is paying attention to it, which is a shame because it is a preview of a conversation this country is going to have to have eventually.

Labour and the Conservatives have dominated British politics since the 1920s. Between them they have held every government for over a century, alternating power in a system so structurally similar to America’s two party arrangement that political scientists use them almost interchangeably when modeling democratic duopolies. That arrangement is currently collapsing in real time. Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s insurgent party, is polling ahead of both legacy parties simultaneously and projections suggest it could win a parliamentary majority at the next general election. The Liberal Democrats are absorbing moderate Conservative voters from the other flank. Both establishment parties are hemorrhaging support not to each other but outward, to alternatives that did not exist as serious political forces five years ago.

The reason is not complicated. British voters did not suddenly change their values or discover new ideological preferences. They ran out of patience with institutions that kept failing them and finally had somewhere else to go. That last part matters enormously. The relief valve opened because the structural ceiling on third party viability in Britain’s parliamentary system is lower than the one America has spent two centuries building.

Which brings us home.

Congress currently holds a 10% approval rating. Not 10% among one party or 10% in a single region. Ten percent of the American public, across every demographic, believes the institution responsible for governing this country is doing a good job. For context, that is roughly the same percentage of people who believe the moon landing was faked. It is lower than the approval rating of the IRS. According to long-standing polling trends, it is even lower than the approval rating of head lice or root canals.

Despite this, we just finished another election cycle where over 90% of incumbents kept their seats.

That paradox is worth sitting with because it reveals how broken the feedback loop actually is. In a functional market, any product with 10% customer satisfaction gets pulled from the shelves. Congress is that product, and the two-party duopoly is the company that refuses to discontinue it. When a business fails its audience so completely, competitors enter the space and consumers move on. But Congress operates outside the laws of supply and demand because the two-party duopoly has systematically eliminated the conditions that make replacement possible.

Between gerrymandered districts, ballot access laws written by the very parties they protect, and a primary system that rewards the loudest 15% of each base, incumbents have effectively insulated themselves from the 90% of the country that disapproves of their performance. The architecture was not designed this way accidentally. It was built deliberately by the people it protects, refined over decades through legislation and court decisions that both parties supported when it was their turn to benefit, and it functions exactly as intended.

The frustration driving Reform UK’s rise in Britain is structurally identical to what American polling has been showing for years. The difference is not the level of anger. The numbers are arguably worse here. The difference is that British voters found an exit and American voters have not, because the exit in America was sealed by the same people who benefit from keeping it sealed.

The question worth asking is not why Americans are angry at Congress. At 10% approval the anger explains itself. The real question is how much longer the architecture holds before the pressure finds a different exit, and what that exit looks like in a system specifically engineered to prevent one from opening.

—

In 2008, Barack Obama did something the American political establishment had not seen before and did not fully understand until it was too late to contain, winning the presidency not by working through the Democratic Party’s existing infrastructure but by building something parallel to it, something faster, more emotionally resonant, and fundamentally more powerful than anything the consultant class had ever assembled. Small dollar fundraising at a scale that made traditional donor networks irrelevant, digital organizing that reached voters the party had long written off as too unreliable to bother with, and a coalition that treated the campaign itself as a movement rather than a transaction were the tools, and the party took credit for the outcome, declared the coalition theirs, and spent the next eight years failing to understand that what Obama had built was built around Obama specifically and would not simply transfer to the next candidate they chose to anoint.

What nobody in either party wanted to say out loud in 2016 is that Trump looked at the architecture Obama’s team had proven could work, recognized that its mechanics were not ideologically locked to any particular set of politics, and ran the same play with entirely different content to an audience that was just as hungry for the emotional transaction as Obama’s coalition had been. The rallies engineered for tribal belonging rather than policy delivery, the small dollar donations that functioned less as fundraising and more as a psychological ownership stake turning donors into evangelists, the posture toward the party establishment that treated institutional resistance as proof of authenticity rather than a warning sign, all of it was structurally identical to what had worked eight years earlier even as the surface details were completely unrecognizable.

Zohran Mamdani and Graham Platner are simply the next generation running the same proven architecture, with Mamdani having just won New York City by campaigning explicitly against the most institutionally entrenched Democratic machine in the country, and Platner having outpaced a two-term Maine governor with full party backing while surviving a Nazi tattoo and a digital trail of offensive Reddit posts that would have ended any conventionally vetted candidate in any previous cycle. The issues these two are running on bear no resemblance to Trump’s politics and the coalitions they are assembling look nothing like his, but the method is close enough to be recognizable to anyone who has been paying attention to how American campaigns actually work rather than how the consultant class describes them.

The collapse of the gatekeeping function that political parties spent decades building is what connects all of this, and that function existed precisely because unfiltered democracy at scale produces unpredictable results. Donor networks, endorsement chains, party infrastructure, editorial board processes, debate qualifications, all of it was designed partly to slow the selection process down enough that candidates could be evaluated before they reached voters at full velocity. The gates were imperfect and frequently captured by self-interested insiders, which is a real and legitimate criticism, but they performed a filtering function that the current environment has rendered almost completely inoperable, and Obama cleared them not through malice but through a combination of exceptional talent and perfect timing that permanently demonstrated they could be cleared and changed the calculus for everyone who came after him.

The uncomfortable truth that neither party wants to reckon with is that this architecture selects for candidates who are exceptional at the emotional mechanics of populist mobilization and tells you almost nothing about their capacity to govern. Obama was genuinely rare in that he was good at both, which is part of why the lesson his campaign taught was so dangerous when extracted from its original context. Trump was historic at the mobilization side and governed through chaos. Platner and Mamdani are entirely unproven at governance and the voters choosing them are not primarily making a governance calculation, they are making an emotional one, deciding that the energy and the anger and the authenticity of the campaign is worth more than any serious evaluation of what comes after election day.

What makes the Platner situation particularly revealing is not the candidate himself but the speed and unanimity with which the Democratic establishment fell in behind him the moment the math changed. Chuck Schumer, who spent years as one of the most visible enforcers of the party’s moral brand, announced his support within hours of Janet Mills suspending her campaign. The same institutional apparatus that demanded Al Franken resign over a photograph, that made character and dignity and zero tolerance for offensive language the centerpiece of its electoral identity for the better part of a decade, lined up behind a man with a Nazi tattoo he wore for nearly twenty years, a documented history of racist commentary, anti-gay slurs, and written statements telling sexual assault victims to take personal responsibility for what happened to them. Senator Chris Van Hollen went on camera and explained it away with PTSD. Bernie Sanders said it changed nothing about his support. The party’s message, delivered clearly and without apparent embarrassment, is that the standard applies when it is useful and gets suspended when the Senate majority math requires it.

The question worth sitting with is not whether voters have short memories, because the evidence from Maine suggests they do not. Democratic primary voters in that state are not unaware of Platner’s record. They know, and they have decided that flipping Susan Collins’ seat is worth more than the consistency principle the party spent a decade selling them. That is a rational political calculation on its own narrow terms, but it retroactively reframes every application of that standard over the last ten years as a tactical weapon rather than a genuine moral commitment. If the principle was real, it would hold regardless of the electoral stakes. The fact that it dissolved within hours of a polling average shifting tells you everything you need to know about what it actually was.

The architecture Obama built was genuinely revolutionary and the man who built it was genuinely exceptional, and what the Democratic Party never grappled with honestly is that revolutionary tools do not stay in the hands of their inventors and exceptional individuals do not produce replicable results simply by association. Trump proved the architecture was portable across ideological lines. Mamdani and Platner are proving it is portable across character lines as well, and the party that spent a decade insisting character was destiny is now the one making that proof of concept possible. Until someone in American politics is willing to rebuild a vetting function that voters accept as legitimate rather than self-serving, and until the parties are willing to hold their own candidates to the same standard they apply to the opposition, the architecture is going to keep selecting for people who are extraordinary at winning and entirely unprepared for what winning actually requires.

Subscribe now