A thread for Democrats Only
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UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Congress could be headed for a tipping point, an irreversible decline
After nearly two decades covering Capitol Hill, a reflection on how bad things are.
By Paul Kane | March 21, 2026 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/21/paul-kane-congress-
tipping-point/
In Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” a down-on-his-luck Scottish veteran of World War I is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” Mike Campbell responds. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
That famous line, written 100 years ago, has become a catchall phrase to describe institutions that are in the midst of collapse, something that slowly and steadily decays until the moment everything implodes.
And that dynamic could soon apply to Congress, according to independent experts and those that have served in the body. These critics are sounding the alarm that the institution needs a major course correction or else it will slide into a permanent state of weakness that further empowers the presidency.
Earlier this month, the Bipartisan Policy Center began publishing a report that suggests the decades-long slide on Capitol Hill is reaching a point of no return.
Under the headline of “Congress at a Crossroads,” the initial report cites the often mentioned “polarization” and “nationalization” of politics that pushes lawmakers toward trying for attention in this new media era without putting in the necessary work to pass laws.
“Despite decades of bipartisan offenses and bipartisan critiques, nothing seems to change,” wrote J.D. Rackey and Michael Thorning, the center’s main authors of the report. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/congress-at-a-crossroads/
None of these symptoms is particularly new but no one has done anything major to fix it and instead things keep steadily getting worse, Rackey and Thorning wrote. “This has been the status quo since the late 20th century; however, it is starting to fray.”
Longtime lawmakers who recently retired, as well as members who decided to quit after short and frustrating tenures, choose more blunt phrases to describe today’s Congress.
“I learned ninth-grade civics: You’ve got three equal branches of government. But right now, the Congress is not one of them. It abdicated everything to the White House,” Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican who served more than 35 years in the House before retiring in 2023, recently told The Post’s Liz Goodwin.
“I don’t want to sound like a prepper. I believe there will be a tipping point, and I think that we’re actually pretty close to it,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) told the New York Times, explaining her decision to announce her retirement plans after just seven years in the Senate.
These dire warnings have been a regular feature of my reporting on Congress for nearly two decades at The Washington Post, particularly the last decade of writing this @PKCapitol column that was meant to be a more analytical look at what was going right and wrong.
This is my last column at The Post, as I head out for another job, prompting a lot of reflection, particularly about the institution at the heart of this column.
Year after year, decade after decade, past House and Senate leaders brushed aside warnings about the disappearing Congress as sky-is-falling hyperbole. The result, almost everyone agrees, is a weakened legislative branch that gets steamrolled by the president (Democrat or Republican) and a Supreme Court that has taken an openly hostile tone to lawmakers.
“Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote in an opinion rejecting President Donald Trump’s tariff policies that also excoriated Congress for not doing its job.
The question is whether, at this juncture, Congress can recover and become a vibrant, equal branch of government to the presidency and the Supreme Court.
Or, quite possibly, the institution has gradually decayed to the point where it may remain permanently weakened, a far cry from its designation
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Congress could be headed for a tipping point, an irreversible decline
After nearly two decades covering Capitol Hill, a reflection on how bad things are.
By Paul Kane | March 21, 2026 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/21/paul-kane-congress-
tipping-point/
In Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,”
Translated = "Oh, how I do enjoy the smell of my own farts."
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Here is an article about moderation. Respect your enemies because they are human, too. But toward the end, it does get around to Nazis. What to do about them. Briefly, it is advisable to kill them, kill them all, even the Nazis who are so silly and depraved they don't know what a Nazi is. But doesn't killing them make you a Nazi? No. The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Some people long for bold, visionary leaders. Others value technocratic expertise. But there’s a third alternative.
By David Brooks | March 25, 2026, 6 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/make-better-decisions-trimme
r/686522/
As president, George W. Bush got ridiculed for calling himself “the decider.” It seemed so pompous and self-important. But in reality, we are all deciders. The quality of our lives is determined by the quality of the decisions we make about how to move into the future.
There are two dominant models for how to make those decisions. The first is the heroic-visionary model. In this model, a leader sees further into the future than everybody else. He goes with his instincts. He takes big risks and makes bold choices. This model seems inspiring and romantic until the heroic leader leads you off a cliff. Napoleon seemed all-knowing until he pursued his invasion of Russia into the wintertime.
The failures of the heroic model induced people to come up with an opposite approach, which we’ll call the technocratic model. The technocrat is taught not to go with his gut but instead to use reason, amass data, and weigh evidence using a formal and impersonal decision-making methodology, like a decision tree, matrix, or spreadsheet. This is the kind of decision-making process that often gets taught in business schools. It seems so sober and scientific. The problem is that the world is complicated, and most of it cannot be quantified and put into a spreadsheet. You wind up with Robert McNamara leading a disastrous war in Vietnam. You wind up with all those finely trained executives at Kodak who didn’t foresee that the future of photography was going to be digital. In their own bland way, the technocrats can be even more arrogant than the heroic visionaries because they don’t have any humanistic insight into how people behave.
So what’s a reasonable person to do?
Well, let’s go back to the 1680s and a British aristocrat named George Savile, who became the first Marquess of Halifax. He lived during one of the most treacherous periods in his country’s history. The Catholic king, James II, was bitterly opposed by the Protestant aristocrats, who feared Catholic domination and French influence. A bunch of Protestant nobles invited the Protestant Dutch prince, William of Orange, to invade England and take over the throne. He did so, sending James into exile in France, from where James launched his own invasion to recapture power, which failed. Halifax managed to be a senior advisor to both King James and King William, seeking national conciliation. He then became speaker of the House of Lords during the Parliament that resolved the crisis and brought forth a series of reforms that increased the power of Parliament and reduced the power of the crown.
He was the very picture of prudent moderation—and in those polarized times, people hated him for it. Halifax was excoriated by those on both extremes for being a “trimmer.” Instead of siding with one extreme or the other, he was accused of trimming his sails to take advantage of shifts in the prevailing winds. The trimmer was an unpopular stock character of the age. One critic compared him to an aquatic mammal reclassified as seafood to dodge Lenten prohibitions on meat, calling the trimmer “a kind of state-otter, neither fish nor flesh, and yet he smells of both.” Another called him a political “hermaphrodite.”
Halifax shot back with an essay titled “The Character of a Trimmer,” which essentially said: You accuse me of being a Trimmer? You’re damn right I am! He held up the Tr
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The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent. The media missed it
By Steve H. Hanke and David M. Walker
March 23, 2026, 11:14 AM ET
https://fortune.com/2026/03/23/us-government-insolvent-fiscal-crisis-f
ix/
Steve Hanke is a professor of applied economics at The Johns Hopkins University and a member of the Board of Directors at the Federal Fiscal Sustainability Foundation. He is the co-editor, with Barry W. Poulson and John Merrifield, of Public Debt Sustainability: International Perspectives (Lexington Books, 2022).
David M. Walker is the former Comptroller General of the United States and the Chairman of the Board of Directors at the Federal Fiscal Sustainability Foundation.
The U.S. government is insolvent. That’s not hyperbole — it’s the conclusion drawn directly from the Treasury Department’s own consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2025, released last week to near-total media silence. The numbers: $6.06 trillion in total assets against $47.78 trillion in total liabilities as of September 30, 2025.
Importantly, the $47.78 trillion in reported liabilities does not include the unfunded obligations of social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare — those are disclosed separately in the off-balance-sheet Statement of Social Insurance (SOSI).
The government’s consolidated balance sheet position, excluding the SOSI, deteriorated by nearly $2.07 trillion between FY 2024 and FY 2025, reaching a staggering negative $41.72 trillion. Total liabilities are now nearly eight times the value of reported assets. The largest drivers were a $2 trillion increase in federal debt and interest payable (now $30.33 trillion) and a $438.8 billion increase in federal employee and veteran benefits payable (now $15.47 trillion).
The Off-Balance-Sheet Iceberg
The off-balance-sheet picture is even more alarming. The 75-year unfunded social insurance obligation surged by $10.1 trillion in a single year, rising from $78.3 trillion in FY 2024 to $88.4 trillion in FY 2025 — driven primarily by a $6.9 trillion jump in projected Medicare Part B shortfalls and a $2.5 trillion increase for Social Security. The Treasury’s Statement of Long-Term Fiscal Projections shows the 75-year fiscal gap widening from 4.3% of GDP in FY 2024 to 4.7% in FY 2025.
If the $88.4 trillion in 75-year off-balance-sheet obligations were added to the $47.8 trillion in official balance sheet liabilities, total federal obligations would now exceed $136.2 trillion — roughly five times U.S. annual GDP.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a disclaimer of opinion on the U.S. government’s FY 2025 financial statements — the 29th consecutive year it has been unable to determine whether the statements are fairly presented. This is primarily due to serious, ongoing financial management problems at the Department of Defense and weaknesses in accounting for interagency transactions.
What $136 Trillion Looks Like in Your Living Room
Not only has the financial press ignored the consolidated financial statements, but most members of Congress and members of the general public will not read the consolidated financial statements. Documents like the consolidated financial statements are not the kind of thing you want to read before driving. If that’s not bad enough, most people cannot relate to the trillion-dollar numbers in the financial statements. Therefore, it is appropriate to translate them into terms that people will understand.
Most people cannot relate to trillion-dollar figures on a government ledger. So consider this: divide every number by 100 million — drop eight zeros — and federal finances look like a household budget in freefall.
That household earns $52,446 and spends $73,378 — running a $20,932 annual deficit. Its total liabilities and unfunded promises amount to $1,361,788 against just $60,554 in assets, leaving it $1.3 million in the hole. Uncle Sam, by any accounting standard, is insolvent.
Congress has clearly lost control of the nation’s finances. Americ
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The Manosphere Turns on Trump
By Elaine Godfrey | March 29, 2026
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/03/iran-war-trump-maga/68657
1/
About half an hour into Episode 694 of the Flagrant podcast, and after a lively debate over manscaping methods, Andrew Schulz leaned back into the couch and brought the chin-wag to a screeching halt. “Are you guys, like—do you feel existential anxiety about the war?” he asked his co-hosts. Schulz seemed to be feeling some. “Americans can’t fucking afford health care,” he said later. “They don’t care about what’s happening in Iran!” War hawks have been angling for years for this war, he added. With President Trump, “they found a guy stupid enough to do it.”
Schulz voted for Trump in 2024, after having him on the podcast—a move that angered a lot of liberals. But the 42-year-old comedian was never what one might call “full MAGA,” and he isn’t explicitly Republican. Instead, Schulz is representative of a not-insignificant slice of Trump’s voting base: nonideological guys who love free speech and are drawn to politicians who seem anti-establishment and, maybe more important, anti-woke. (The podcaster-comedians Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Tim Dillon, and Dave Smith all fit somewhere in this camp.) With their help, Trump pulled off his improbable comeback.
But a lot has changed since November 2024. Schulz and many of his fellow manosphere commentators seem to feel—by varying degrees—duped by the president they helped elect. Some have been airing those grievances for months, starting with Trump's handling of the Epstein files and, later, the killing of American citizens at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis. To Schulz and others like him, a brand-new war in the Middle East is a betrayal so massive, you almost have to laugh. “The only shot you have at a good life right now is to hasten the rapture,” Tim Dillon, another podcaster and comedian, said on a recent show. “The foreign and economic policy of our country currently is the rapture.”
The evolving views of Schulz and others in this cohort are notable because they represent a reversal of support for the president. Their discontent had been mounting since even before Trump went to war. “The cracks have been forming for a while,” Charlie Sabgir, the director of the group Young Men Research Project, told me. For some, Iran “might be the last straw.”
The MAGA faithful are overwhelmingly sticking with the president. Not so for everyone else. A number of new polls show that some of the voting blocs that helped power Trump’s 2024 win have lost faith in him: His support among young people has cratered; so has his approval among Latinos. According to one survey, more independent voters disapprove of the president now than they did at any point in his first term. The broad coalition that put Trump back in the White House no longer appears to exist. In the short term, this development bodes well for Democrats. Longer term, it might shed some light on the next iteration of Trumpism.
I’ve watched almost every new episode of Flagrant since the 2024 election. The show, which stars Schulz and his comedian sidekick Akaash Singh, along with their co-hosts AlexxMedia and Mark Gagnon, is often hilarious, sometimes insightful, and frequently mind-numbingly dumb. The most interesting segments involve Schulz and the guys debating the news of the day, when they argue gamely about their loosely held opinions, most of which don’t scan as neatly liberal or conservative. They sound, in other words, a lot like the average American voter.
Schulz voted for Trump in 2024 partly because he didn’t trust Democrats with the economy and partly because he considers the Democrats to be pious and annoying. He and the guys seemed particularly excited about the testosterone of the incoming administration. “The way that Tom Homan was talking about them cartels? This is fire!” Schulz said. Later, on the subject of the Houthis in Yemen, Singh gleefully predicted that “Trump be bringing the ruckus to these folks!”
But Trump didn’t bring enough ruckus
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The Achilles Heel of Trump’s Mafia-State Authoritarianism
Posted on Sunday, Apr 5, 2026
by John Ambrosio
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/04/the-achilles-heel-of-tru
mps-mafia-state-authoritarianism.html
In a recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, drew on a paper written by the renowned Czech dissident, and later president, Václav Havel that discussed how totalitarian regimes, like the former Soviet Union, seek to control the population by providing individuals with an “ideological excuse” that enables them to conceal from themselves their silent capitulation, in the face of real and threatened state repression, in order to avoid the shame and indignity of having their obedience to the regime exposed.
. . . to succeed Trump “had to consolidate the new authoritarian regime before the opposition could get its footing and before the broader public could react to the transformation.” While it took some time, the public has awakened to the reality of the Trump presidency. In what at first appeared to be a potential rout of pro-democracy forces, has now become an existential fight for the future of the country as Trump’s mafia-state authoritarianism crashes up against “the powerful system of fortresses and earthworks” of U.S. civil society.
[Those are the first and last paragraphs of a much longer essay.]
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump’s latest rant confirmed what we all know about America
By Pablo O'Hana | April 6, 2026 3:24pm
https://metro.co.uk/2026/04/06/trumps-latest-rant-confirmed-know-ameri
ca-27873632/
Trump’s Republican Party is dead.
Not only in its soul, but in the essential qualities that once defined it. While it may still win seats in the Midterms and retain the loyalty of millions, what truly matters has been lost.
The capacity for independent judgment, for institutional self-respect, for the basic reflex of saying ‘No, not this’, is gone.
Donald Trump’s Easter Sunday post, in which he threatened to bomb Iranian power plants, dropped the f-word into the public record, and signed off with ‘Praise be to Allah’, is not an opportunity to wake up Republican Party officials, members and voters.
It is simply more evidence that they may be breathing, but in reality, they’re dead inside.
We have been here so many times before that Trump reaction commentary has become its own genre, with its own predictable arc. Something happens. Jaws drop. A Republican or two issue carefully worded statements expressing concern. The news cycle moves on. Nothing changes.
The ‘Grab ’em by the pussy’ Access Hollywood tape, which arguably kicked all this off, feels like a lifetime ago.
Then we had a wave of ‘very fine people on both sides’, of children torn from their parents and put in cages, Russian interference and his references to Haiti and African nations as shithole countries leading to his first impeachment.
Not to mention the second impeachment, attempts to overturn an election, and facing 34 felony counts.
There has always been a fresh wave asking whether this, finally, is the moment that takes him down. It never is.
Yesterday was no exception.
At some point, we need to stop asking where the accountability is and consider why there is none.
The answer is not flattering.
What we’re witnessing now is true compliant devotion and the collapse of any structure in which resistance might be possible.
Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, called a racist video depicting the Obamas as apes ‘the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House’ and then carried on as normal.
When the line is crossed and then simply redrawn further back, eventually, there is nowhere left to go.
Trump’s Easter post is a useful illustration precisely because of its particular combination of ingredients.
Profanity from a sitting president, directed at a foreign government, on the holiest morning of the Christian calendar, ending with an invocation of Allah.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that any one of those elements, if attributed to a Democrat, would have prompted weeks of hearings and a hymn of outrage from every evangelical pastor with a television slot.
But when it comes from Trump, it generates a shrug and, from his more devoted supporters, unapologetic delight.
The real, harder question is how a party can lose its soul and yet remain electorally successful, and what that means for America.
Trump’s Republicans will be on the ballot in November, and many of them will likely still win. In a damning insight into the soul of America, the moral decay and decomposition of Trump’s administration are not translating into disaster for the party.
American democracy does not yet have a mechanism for automatically disqualifying the morally bankrupt and broken.
So the issue that needs to be grappled with is not really whether the Republican Party is dead. It is whether America wants to revive it – and if so, how it would be done, and who would do the work.
It’s an issue that belongs, uncomfortably, to the Democrats as much as anyone.
There is a version of the next few years in which the party simply runs out the clock, waits for the exhaustion to set in, and inherits whatever is left. That is a strategy of sorts, but it’s not a vision.
They need to be presented with something worth voting for, rather than simply something to vote against.
That is the reality o
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On a question of morality, the US and Canada are oceans apart. Why?
April 14, 2026, 2:30 p.m. ET | Berlin; toronto; boston; and jakarta, indonesia
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2026/0414/Pew-surve
y-morality-US-Canada-Indonesia
This year, the Pew Research Center decided to try something new. In its annual survey on global views of morality, it added a fresh question for its respondents from around the world.
Do you feel the ethics and morals of others in your country are good?
The United States finished last.
It was the only country among the 25 surveyed where more than half of respondents rated the ethics and morals of people in their country as somewhat bad or very bad.
Canada – which usually ranks similarly to the U.S. in such surveys – finished first. Some 92% of Canadians rated fellow Canadians as having somewhat good or very good ethics and morals.
It was a perplexing result, running dramatically against longtime trends shown by similar studies.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-country-survey-a
mericans-especially-likely-to-view-fellow-citizens-as-morally-bad/
“There’s no paper out there that explains this,” says Joshua Conrad Jackson, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago. “We don’t really know what’s going on in the survey.”
Researchers are trying to piece together what it might mean. Given that this was the first time the question was ever asked, was it a blip? An outlier? Or has it unearthed something new about how Americans think about morality and each other?
No one is willing to say they have the answer. But a range of theories has given fresh fuel to decades-long conversations about polarization and social trust. Do Americans increasingly see one another as unethical? Not everyone thinks that’s necessarily what this survey highlights. But looking at the U.S., Canada, and Indonesia – which came fractionally second to Canada in the Pew survey – offers insights and ideas to consider, if not definitive answers. And it suggests potential ways back for the U.S. Not only are moral views of one another often wrong, but America was also once a global leader in overcoming entrenched lines of division.
Many theories
Part of the challenge with drawing firm conclusions from this particular survey is that researchers are not entirely sure what respondents are telling them. Morality is a difficult subject to quantify; people disagree on the definition, and some respondents deny that it is even a thing. For that reason, studies on morality are often closely linked with similar studies on ethics, kindness, or trust.
In the past, these studies have revealed several findings that generally hold true across societies and over time. Respondents think the morality of those close to them is stronger than the morality of those they don’t know, and they believe that morality in society is getting worse.
The results of the latest Pew survey don’t fit neatly into either of those trends.
Adam Mastroianni – a social psychologist who, one colleague says, “knows more about this topic than anyone in the world” – is stumped.
“It appears to be out of step with a lot of other surveys we’ve seen,” says Dr. Mastroianni, author of the science newsletter Experimental History.
But he has a theory.
“Here’s what I think might be happening,” he says in an email conversation. “When you ask Canadians: ‘How moral are Canadians?’ they hear that question as, ‘How moral is Canada compared to other relevant countries?’ And they say: ‘Very moral,’ because in the news they mainly see other countries blowing each other up.”
Otherwise, why would so many Canadians say other Canadians are moral, when in other surveys, Canadians routinely say nearly half of Canadians can’t be trusted?
Pew’s Kirsten Lesage is loath to draw conclusions, even as an author of the study. But a few things stick out to her:
Usually, young adults and older adults have broadly similar views on tr
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The Sorrow and the Pity can be downloaded for free from
https://thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=The+Sorrow+and+the+Pity&cat=
0
The Film That Explains Contemporary America
The Sorrow and the Pity has lessons for how authoritarianism takes root—and how to fight against it.
By David A. Graham | April 18, 2026
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/sorrow-and-pity-trump/686829/
The best thing I watched in the past year was an epically long movie about retired militants, but it wasn’t One Battle After Another, the Oscar winner for Best Picture. It was The Sorrow and the Pity, a four-hour documentary from 1969 about life in Nazi-occupied France. Reviewing the film in The Atlantic in 1972, David Denby called it “one of the greatest documentaries ever made,” and that remains true. What makes the film so effective is not how it looks at the Germans, a spectral presence, but how it chronicles the way that many ordinary citizens simply lived their lives as if nothing had changed.
The director Marcel Ophuls, who died last year at 97, explores collaboration and resistance through the lens of a small city, Clermont-Ferrand. It’s about an hour from Vichy, where the Nazis established a puppet government headed by the World War I hero Philippe Pétain. Pétain’s former protégé Charles de Gaulle fled to Britain, coordinated resistance to the Nazis, and returned to lead a free France. The idea that the French almost uniformly opposed Nazism, with only a few bad apples collaborating, is foundational to France’s postwar identity. The problem, as Ophuls, a Franco-German Jew, demonstrates, is that this is a myth.
Ophuls (who later became a U.S. citizen) interviews leaders of the Resistance, former guerrillas, an ex-Nazi soldier, an anti-Vichy politician who escaped prison in Clermont-Ferrand, and a French aristocrat who joined the Waffen-SS. Most revealingly, he speaks with ordinary residents who represented a big swath of French society: They didn’t actively collaborate, but by declining to resist and going along with the government, they enabled the occupation. I have seen many examples, in the past decade, of journalists and historians using historical encounters with fascism and authoritarianism to comment on the present moment in the United States. Often, these parallels are forced; the situation in the U.S. is a far cry from Nazi-occupied Europe. But Ophuls’s film is illuminating precisely because its lessons about complicity apply to evil and corruption of all kinds. Although there’s no substitute for watching the whole film, four hours is a lot, so I have distilled a few important takeaways.
Old hatreds: When a society begins to break, the fault lines aren’t new. That is true in the U.S., where xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia are rampant, and where those in power have brought bigotry from the margins back to the fore. The same was true in France. “Anti-Semitism and anglophobia are feelings that are never hard to stir up in France. Even if reactions to such things are dormant or stifled, all it takes is one event” to make them come alive, Pierre Mendès France, a politician who served as prime minister in the 1950s, says in the film. The Vichy regime, like MAGA politicians and media personalities, simply had to find the right propaganda to agitate the population and, if not win them over, at least drive them away from other groups that might threaten the government.
False neutrality: An authoritarian government doesn’t require support from a huge portion of the population, but it does require acquiescence. Many Vichy-era French tried to just live their life as though the crimes going on around them were not their concern. Denis Rake, a former undercover British agent, recalls that working-class French were eager to help him and to shelter him, even at
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In the future, nobody is going to admit to supporting all you ceaselessly whining little faggots.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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