Policy

Expand the Child Tax Credit

Tax Parents Less. Do Not Put Them on the Dole. N.B. This follows "A Parent is Not a Vendor." If policy can pay a parent for being a parent, it can pay a person for being a person. That is the sentence the Vance draft cannot survive. A future Democratic administration will not need to love stay-at-home marriage. It will keep the payee and delete the adjectives. It will call the marriage gate discriminatory, relax the hours test, raise the income cap, and tell Congress the Child Care and Development Fund is oversubscribed, which it will be. Ro Khanna already wrote…

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A Parent is Not a Vendor

Do Not Put Parents on the CCDF Ledger A stay-at-home parent is not a vendor. A Clinton-era work pot is not a family stipend. Do the family work in the tax code. The Trump administration is drafting a rule that would let some married stay-at-home parents collect money from the Child Care and Development Fund. Vice President JD Vance has made the idea a priority. The draft invents a new category called "parent-based child care." One spouse works at least thirty-five hours a week. The other stays home with the child. The family meets the income test. The check, about nine…

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Positive Labor Day Numbers

Labor Day, and the Slope Changed The official story finally faces the same direction as the policy. Labor Day is the weekend America sets aside to praise work and then talk about anything else. This year the holiday has a plot. The government spent Friday morning describing a country that no longer looks like the one it described from 2021 to 2024. The border is not a monthly spectacle. The foreign-born population is not still climbing like a flood gauge. The job market did not fall through the floor when the inflow stopped. That is not atmosphere. That is the official…

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The Art of the Hemisphere, Part VI

The Orinoco Settlement N.B. Read Parts I, II, III, IV, and V of this series. January 3 was the writ. August 28 was the recording. This series has treated the Western Hemisphere as an operating theater, not a neighborhood watch. Part II called the Orinoco the biggest real-estate deal since Manhattan. Part IV flew Maduro and Cilia Flores to New York. Part V carried the same logic north to Greenland. Friday closed the southern flank. President Trump and Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, put a number on the prize named before the raid. Seventeen fields. Sixty-five billion barrels. A private company…

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The Agriculture Lobby’s Amnesty Bill

SAWA: The Sneer at American Workers In April I went through the DIGNIDAD Act section by section and called it what it is: an awful amnesty bill slicker and roughly four times larger than the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli scam. It still sits in committee. It should die there. Now comes the industry-specific sequel. H.R. 9535, the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act of 2026, introduced by House Agriculture Chairman G.T. Thompson, arrives wrapped in the language of modernization and food security. Supporters insist it contains no pathway to citizenship. They call it practical reform so farmers can secure a legal workforce. Read the bill.…

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Thune’s Excuses

When Leadership Becomes Explanation John Thune sat down with Sean Hannity and offered the same defense he has repeated for months. Here is the exchange on eliminating the legislative filibuster: Hannity: Getting rid of the filibuster: nonstarter? You don’t have the votes? Thune: Well, we don’t. And I’ve actually, I’ve had this conversation with the president many times, I think as you know. I actually suggested at one point that they, his team, come up and sit down and visit with some of my colleagues. So they came up, about twenty Republican senators, and fifteen were a no on getting rid…

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Rand Paul’s Relentless Document War

The Paper Trail They Tried to Bury Rand Paul does not traffic in vibes. He collects documents. While most of Washington moved on, while the same officials who shaped the COVID response collected awards, wrote memoirs, and settled into think-tank sinecures, Paul kept prying open the record. One FOIA fight, one transcribed interview, one redacted package at a time. The result now sits in his Senate Homeland Security “Reading Room”: a growing archive that maps the distance between what the public was told and what the people in charge actually knew, funded, and protected. Follow the money. Follow the research. Follow…

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Thune’s Failure

Thune’s Weakness on the SAVE America Act The base already knows. Sean Spicer said it out loud on The Huddle: enthusiasm is soft, and the failure to pass the SAVE America Act is a primary reason. I am in that base. I work Texas Republican politics. I hear what people say when the cameras are off. Spicer is right. When voters who delivered unified government watch the House pass a core election-integrity bill repeatedly while the Senate finds reasons not to finish the job, the energy drains. That is not complicated. It is cause and effect. The underlying problem is concrete.…

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New Jersey’s Voter Roll Failure

A Textbook Case for Passing the SAVE America Act On Tuesday, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill stepped to the podium and admitted what Democrats have spent years denying: non-citizens had made their way onto the state’s voter rolls, and some had voted. Roughly 6,600 people who had explicitly answered “no” when asked if they were United States citizens still ended up registered between June 2023 and June 2024. Preliminary numbers showed fewer than 400 cast ballots. Sherrill blamed a software glitch at the Motor Vehicle Commission under her predecessor, Phil Murphy. She ordered removals, launched an investigation, and promised accountability. Then…

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Republicans Got Played

The Housing Bill That Gave Democrats Everything They Wanted Follow-on to “The DSA’s Housing Trojan Horse” and “¡Afuera!” I warned you. The ROAD to Housing Act was never a serious supply-side fix. It was a cash cow for sanctuary cities, fraudsters, nonprofits, and the Democrat Socialist machine bent on turning American housing into a government-controlled enterprise. Now it’s law. And Democrats are celebrating like they just won the lottery. Senator Elizabeth Warren and her allies are flooding their feeds, crowing about this “groundbreaking” victory. They call it the biggest housing bill in decades, claiming it will build more units, lower costs,…

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