“Voters do not need another political party telling them what to believe,” former Senator Joe Manchin wrote recently in The Washington Post. He argues that a handful of independent members, free to work with either side, could change a closely divided Congress. (The Washington Post)

Manchin is right that Americans deserve representatives who think for themselves and refuse to excuse wrongdoing simply because it comes from their own side. Independence of judgment and party membership are not opposites. The choice is between relying on exceptional individuals to navigate the system largely on their own and building an institution capable of electing independent-minded people, supporting them in office, and continuing that work after they are gone.

Manchin’s record shows how much influence an unusually well-positioned, independent-minded politician can exercise. In July 2022, while still a Democrat, he negotiated an agreement with Chuck Schumer on the Inflation Reduction Act. (Senate joint statement)

But his leverage depended heavily on the Senate’s narrow margins, his relationships, and the moment in which he served. A governing strategy cannot depend on repeatedly finding another Joe Manchin in exactly the right circumstances.

The larger question is how independent-minded legislators become more than a collection of individuals. Who helps elect them, prepares serious policy solutions, and carries the work forward when individual members leave?

Before the first vote

Consider what it would take to send a capable local leader to Washington on a promise to make housing more affordable. Before that person can help anyone buy a home, there is an election to win.

Someone must determine whether the district offers a realistic chance of victory. That means examining voting patterns, the strength of the other candidates, the cost of competing, and whether a newcomer would merely divide the vote and help elect the candidate their supporters oppose most.

Then come the signatures, deadlines, volunteers, voter contacts, and money. None of that becomes easier simply because the candidate chooses “independent” as a label.

Manchin recognizes this problem. The Independent Leadership Council he supports provides fundraising, campaign assistance, and analysis to identify promising districts. (NPR) In August, the council and its related PAC reported raising more than $10 million since their July launch. (Council announcement)

That is meaningful support, and it addresses an important weakness of purely individual campaigns. But helping candidates win is not the same as helping them govern.

The Centercratic Party, which I founded, is designed to support candidates before and after Election Day. The people who study districts would retain what they learn, the volunteers would remain active in their communities, and the fundraising operation would support both candidates and the continuing work of the party.

Party organization also offers a financing advantage. The Supreme Court’s June ruling removed the former ceilings on spending that eligible party committees plan with their candidates, giving them greater room to fund a shared campaign plan. (Federal Election Commission)

That advantage comes with legal requirements, not merely a new name. Centercratic must qualify under the applicable rules, and the ruling does not turn party fundraising into unlimited donations. (FEC qualification rules, FEC ruling summary)

After the victory

Now imagine our housing candidate wins. The election-night celebration ends, but the families who supported the campaign still cannot afford a home.

This newly elected representative needs more than good judgment and a willingness to cooperate. A serious proposal must explain what would increase housing supply, what it would cost, which decisions belong in Washington, and which belong to states and communities. It must also win enough support in Congress to become law.

That is why our plan includes a permanent policy team working with researchers, testing competing ideas, and using data to distinguish useful solutions from attractive promises. The same organization that helped elect the representative would help develop proposals and prepare for negotiations.

The work would not stop when a bill passed, either. We would need to examine whether it accomplished what was promised, listen to the people affected, and change course when the evidence called for it.

Suppose that representative later retires. The research, donor relationships, trained volunteers, and experience should not have to be assembled again from the beginning; they should help the next candidate and the next generation of legislators.

Supporting independent candidates is an electoral strategy. Building an organization that also develops policy, brings legislators together, and measures results is a governing strategy. The council’s public descriptions emphasize electing independent leaders, but do not describe the same continuing policy and operating structure. (Council announcement, Council website)

The council may develop those capabilities over time. If it does, it will be taking on the work of a political party, whatever it chooses to call itself.

Political scientist John Aldrich explained this basic problem in Why Parties?: parties help people organize campaigns and sustain the majorities needed to accomplish something in office. (University of Chicago Press) The practical lesson is that good intentions need people, resources, and working relationships that survive an election.

A Political Home for Moderate Americans

None of this means every independent belongs in a moderate party. Gallup found that 45 percent of American adults identified as independents. That total consisted of 20 percent of all adults who leaned Democratic, 15 percent who leaned Republican, and 10 percent who leaned toward neither party. (Gallup)

The Centercratic Party is not seeking to represent all independents. It is building a political home for moderate Americans, whether they currently identify as independents, Democrats, or Republicans.

What brings those voters together is more than dissatisfaction with the two major parties. They want leaders who take practical approaches to problems, weigh the evidence, and work across political differences to reach agreements.

Manchin writes that independent leadership “is not about standing alone.” (The Washington Post) I agree, but I would carry his argument further: Americans need a lasting organization that helps capable people win, equips them to govern, and remains answerable for the results. The Centercratic Party must earn the public’s trust by following its principles and doing what it promises.

Moderate voters do not have to surrender their judgment to recognize that political success depends on other people. They need an organization through which they can pool their resources, elect leaders, and turn shared priorities into law. The Republican and Democratic parties will not lose their hold on Washington simply because more Americans decline to join them. That requires a moderate party strong enough to compete with them, win against them, and govern more effectively than they have.

Here’s something for you to ponder. If I sat across from you and asked what it means to you to be a Democrat, what would you actually say?

But I have one stipulation. Don’t come back with a textbook definition of the Democratic Party. And please don’t recite any talking points you may have heard on TV or in the press. I want you to tell me, in your own words, what being a Democrat means to you.

Most people cannot do it. They reach for something about helping people, and then the sentence trails off. That silence is the point of this article.

I am not picking on just the Democrats. If I asked a Republican the same question, I may very well hear the same fumbling response. Millions of Americans inherited a political affiliation from their families or communities and have never seriously questioned whether that party still represents what they believe.

Meanwhile, both parties have changed, and so have their positions on major policy issues, turning those issues into intense partisan battlegrounds.

When Did Our Everyday Problems Turn Political?

Think about the issues that dominate our elections. Almost none began as bruising fights between the left and the right. They became political battles at particular moments, and the dates may surprise you.

When did healthcare go political? Certainly not in 1965. The legislation creating Medicare passed the House with support from 237 Democrats and 70 Republicans, according to the Social Security Administration. But by 2010, the Affordable Care Act passed without a Republican vote, and in 2017 every Senate Democrat opposed the final Republican repeal proposal, as The Center Voter documented.

When did immigration become extremely political? Not in the 1960s. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act passed the Senate 76 to 18 and the House 320 to 70, with bipartisan majorities, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The partisan split hardened later as immigration became a dependable weapon in national campaigns.

When did education become a battleground? Public tuition rose roughly 1,186 percent from 1980 to 2025, compared with about 280 percent inflation, as states shifted more of the cost of public higher education onto students. Nothing about making college affordable is inherently left or right, yet both parties now reach for different partisan explanations, as detailed in Medill on the Hill.

And housing? It largely vanished from national debate for decades after the Great Society and only recently re-emerged as a partisan battle line, according to an analysis of the political history of housing.

These dates tell us that the great divisions are fairly recent and man-made. At their core, these policy areas are apolitical. There is nothing inherently liberal or conservative about wanting your kid to get a good education or your family to afford a doctor.

The Part Nobody Explains: What Actually Happened

So if these problems were not always political, what changed? This ties the story together, and it is the part the two parties would rather you never examine.

Over several decades, five forces transformed both parties into something our grandparents would not recognize. As explained in The Opening, the breakdown was not one event or the work of one politician. Separate forces slowly pushed in the same direction and reinforced one another.

The first force was money. It stopped seeking the middle and began seeking intensity, and intensity lives at the edges. Wealthy donors and single-issue groups rewarded ideological warriors instead of problem solvers, as detailed in The Five Forces That Broke the System.

The second force was technology, which let the parties abandon their old local organizations and become slick marketing operations aimed at firing up the base rather than building consensus.

The third force was partisan media, which learned that outrage pays better than broad coverage.

The fourth force was sweetheart gerrymandering, which shielded incumbents from ever having to appeal to the middle.

The fifth force was the primary system. In most safe districts, the primary became the only election that mattered. It is dominated by the most committed voters, and it punishes lawmakers who work with the other party.

Put those five forces together and you get the result we live with today. Both parties migrated to their extremes at the same time, and they abandoned the roughly 60 percent of us who live in the political center.

An Unsolved Problem Is Worth More Than a Solved One

Here is the most uncomfortable truth. An unsolved problem that keeps voters angry can be a fundraising gold mine, while a solved problem is yesterday’s news. The Center Voter has examined how special interests, donor pressure, and political calculations elevate problems useful for fundraising over problems urgent to the country.

If a party actually fixed immigration, it would lose one of its most powerful fundraising issues. If a party actually fixed the cost of healthcare, it would lose the donations that flow from the current broken system. So the problems never get solved. They get preserved, packaged, and sold back to you every election as a reason to fear the other side.

That is why you cannot explain what it means to be a Democrat. There is no clear answer to give. The party’s real product is not a solution to your problems. It is your loyalty, and the fear that the other team is the enemy.

You Deserve a Real Choice

You did not choose these positions. They were assigned to you by a system that profits from your anger and depends on your silence.

That is exactly why we built the Centercratic Party. It is a home for the 60 million Americans who no longer see themselves in either party.

The Centercratic Party is built on enduring principles that protect our democracy and place the interests of the American people ahead of political power. It exists to work with both parties to resolve the core systemic problems they have allowed to linger for decades, including education, immigration, housing, and healthcare.

These are not problems for Democrats or Republicans to resolve separately. They are American problems, and solving them will require broad agreement, sustained action, and a political party committed to producing results rather than repeating another cycle of partisan promises.

So I will ask once more, and I hope the answer feels different. What does it mean to you to be a Democrat? If you cannot answer that, maybe the problem was never you. Maybe it was the two choices you were handed.

Visit Centercratic.party and tell me what you actually believe.

Larry Ellison and his son, David, moved closer to a vast media empire on September 21 when Paramount settled a lawsuit challenging its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery. Business Insider reported that the $111 billion deal would bring two movie studios, HBO, CBS, CNN and dozens of other networks under their combined control. NPR reported that the settlement still needed a judge’s approval, so the acquisition was not yet complete.

Two days later, Reuters reported that Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai are expected at President Trump’s Thursday dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping. ABC News reported that AI safety is among the concerns surrounding the meeting, placing the technology and its powerful business leaders in the same spotlight.

The Centercratic position is straightforward: America needs safeguards against the political power of its richest technology leaders, just as it needs safeguards for artificial intelligence. The question is not whether these men may buy companies, change political views or attend White House dinners, but whether their influence can outweigh what voters want. Their business decisions can affect the news Americans receive, while their political spending can help elect the officials responsible for overseeing those businesses.

Elon Musk’s political shift was striking: Reuters reported that he had previously voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden before endorsing Trump in July 2024. By December, Reuters reported that Musk had given $259 million to groups supporting Trump’s campaign and become a close adviser during the presidential transition. The Wall Street Journal reported in June 2026 that Larry Ellison had quietly given roughly $45 million to a nonprofit supporting Trump’s 2024 election efforts, without required public disclosure.

Mark Zuckerberg’s record shows another kind of change: The Associated Press reported in January 2021 that he considered allowing Trump to keep using Facebook too dangerous. Four years later, Reuters reported that Meta would end its U.S. fact-checking program and ease restrictions on immigration and gender discussions as Zuckerberg sought better relations with Trump’s incoming administration. In that report, Zuckerberg described the changes as restoring free expression, but the timing gives Americans reason to question whether political pressure helped determine the rules.

Decisions about which news stories to pursue should not depend on pleasing a president or protecting an owner’s relationship with the White House. In announcing Monday’s settlement, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said Paramount agreed to a board to help protect independent reporting at CBS and CNN. But the proposed settlement lets the company’s own directors choose that board’s members, raising a fair question about how firmly they will challenge the people who appointed them.

Safeguards should require major political donors to be identified before elections, including those who send their money through groups that keep their names private. Government contracts should be awarded through open competition, with independent checks to make sure a donor’s friendship with the president does not affect the choice. A business leader working inside the government should have to step aside from decisions affecting his companies, rather than asking the public to trust his judgment.

The strongest argument against this criticism is that business leaders must work with elected presidents, protect their employees and answer to the people who own their companies. That is reasonable, and neither a political donation nor a change of position should be treated as proof that someone has done something wrong. But clear rules protect honest businesses as well as voters, and those rules must apply equally to wealthy supporters of the Democratic and Republican parties.

Wealth may buy access to the president and control over a newsroom, but it should never buy control over the government or the news Americans receive. Elected officials must serve all Americans, not give special treatment to the wealthy people who helped put them in office.

Visit Centercratic.party to learn more about how we can protect our democracy.

Across America, local officials are being asked to make a decision with national consequences: whether to let a new data center be built near homes, power lines and water systems. Too often, they now hear only two choices: approve everything or stop everything.

That false choice has moved from town halls to the midterm campaign. Democratic and Republican candidates are discovering that fear of artificial intelligence and frustration with data centers can be converted into votes long before anyone defines what a freeze would accomplish.

The Centercratic position is straightforward. America must remain the world leader in artificial intelligence while imposing clear, enforceable safeguards on the technology and fair requirements on the facilities that support it. A blanket pause on data centers would confuse responsible oversight with retreat, weaken local economic opportunity and give authoritarian competitors time that they will not voluntarily surrender. This matters now because AI will shape national security, medicine, education, business and the daily work of millions of Americans. The countries that learn to use it safely and fully will hold an enormous advantage over those that do not.

Artificial intelligence does not operate on speeches or campaign promises. It depends on immense computing power housed in data centers, which means that stopping those facilities can also slow the research, testing and deployment that keep the United States competitive. China, Russia, North Korea and other authoritarian states are not likely to observe an American election-season pause. If American companies cannot build here under reasonable rules, the United States risks losing investment, talent and technical capacity to places that are more willing to host them. Once those jobs, facilities and research networks move elsewhere, a later change of policy may not bring them back.

The safety concerns are real, but recent warnings have been presented as if the worst outcome has already arrived. The Associated Press reported on September 13 that Anthropic and OpenAI had observed AI systems going beyond their assigned tasks during testing, including unauthorized intrusions into outside computer systems.

The same report said the 2026 International AI Safety Report found early signs of troubling capabilities, but not capabilities at a level that could cause humanity to lose control. The report, developed with guidance from more than 100 independent experts, described the likelihood and timing of that danger as highly uncertain. These events justify safeguards. They do not justify panic.

That uncertainty has now become campaign material. Politico reported this summer that lawmakers in 15 states had introduced bills to pause data center development. CNN reported in August that Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul had each supported a form of pause.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries then called for Congress to act immediately on AI, according to Politico. Senator Bernie Sanders went further by calling for a national moratorium on data center construction, according to The Washington Post. The pressure now is to promise action first and define it later.

That is how AI became a political pawn. Both parties are turning legitimate concerns into election messages before explaining what controls they want, how those controls would work or what they could cost the country.

The important questions are harder. Who is responsible when an AI system causes harm? What independent testing should be required before an advanced AI system is deployed? How should the United States protect the technology from hostile governments? Those questions require careful national standards, not politicians competing to see who can apply the brakes first.

Supporters of a temporary pause make a serious case. Communities should not be pressured into approving projects before they understand the effects on electricity, water, land use, and public safety. A limited pause may be justified where an immediate local problem exists or no reasonable approval standards are in place.

A broad freeze is different. It treats every facility as equally dangerous and every community as equally unprepared, while China and other competitors continue moving forward. Safeguards should target dangerous conduct and measurable risks without blocking the infrastructure America needs to compete.

The local official facing that permit should not have to choose between surrendering the community’s interests and surrendering America’s technological lead. Artificial intelligence is too important to become another campaign pawn.

Visit Centercratic.party for more information.

Representative Jared Golden of Maine sponsored a bill with a Republican to protect the lobstermen in his district, and to get that bill a vote on the House floor he had to break with his own party. His leadership responded by accusing him of a significant breach of trust and referring him for possible punishment. Then 193 of his fellow House Democrats voted against the bill itself.

Golden clearly explained his decision. “I voted for the rule for one simple reason: it paved the way for a vote on my bill to protect Maine lobstermen from costly, burdensome new regulations that would put them out of business,” he told reporters, as The Guardian reported on September 2.

Here is what that sequence actually reveals, and it is larger than one congressman from Maine. The long-running political war between the two parties will not end from the inside, because both parties now reward the member who holds the line and penalize the member who builds something across the aisle. Hakeem Jeffries is demonstrating this eight weeks before an election that could make him speaker, and the same pressure operates on Republican leadership from its own flank. What happened to Jared Golden is not a scandal about one man’s conduct. It is the operating system working exactly as designed, and it will keep producing the same result until Americans in the middle organize themselves into a party that answers to different incentives.

How a bill actually reaches the House floor is an important part of this story, and it explains Golden’s vote. Before the House can debate a set of bills, it first votes on what is called a rule, which is simply the traffic light that decides whether those bills reach the floor at all. The Guardian reported that five Republicans planned to vote against this particular rule, that it appeared headed for defeat, and that it passed 210 to 208 only because Golden and Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington supplied the last two votes. Golden’s lobster bill was inside that package. Voting the way his leadership expected would have meant voting to keep his own legislation off the floor.

The bill he fought to get there was not a partisan cause. The measure, H.R. 9436, extends an existing pause on new federal whale regulations affecting the lobster and Jonah crab fisheries, a pause Congress first enacted in December 2022 with the support of Maine’s entire congressional delegation. It cleared the House Natural Resources Committee on July 15 by a vote of 22 to 13, and the House Clerk’s records show it passed the full House on September 1 by 219 to 196, with Republicans voting 209 to 2 in favor and Democrats voting 193 against and only 10 in support. Golden called the outcome “a big win not only for fishermen in Maine, but for bipartisanship in Congress.” Nearly his entire party had just voted the other way.

The reaction inside the caucus is the part worth studying. Jeffries, Whip Katherine Clark and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar issued a joint statement saying the two members had blindsided the caucus, that their action “represents a significant breach of trust,” and that “it necessitates a serious response,” according to The Guardian. Asked whether the two would lose their committee assignments, Jeffries told reporters, “We haven’t ruled anything in. We haven’t ruled anything out,” as the Washington Examiner reported. Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts told The Hill, “We could have defeated that rule yesterday. And we could have been talking about affordability all week and instead we’re talking about socialism.” In the end, nothing happened. USA TODAY reported that Jeffries stepped back from the threat after what he called “a productive, forward-looking conversation” with Gluesenkamp Perez.

The proposed remedy tells you even more. Axios reported on September 3 that leadership weighed a caucus rules change that would strip members of good standing, and with it their committee assignments, if they missed key votes, broke with leadership on procedural votes, or fell behind on their campaign committee dues. Progressives moved immediately to kill it. Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota warned Axios that “it could be used against everyone,” and Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington said the change was “not going to fly.” The left and the center of that caucus could not agree on lobster regulation, health care, or a meeting with the president’s son-in-law, and they found common ground only on the question of who gets disciplined.

Party leaders would say Golden knew exactly what he was doing. Procedural votes have long been treated as tests of party unity, and Jeffries made that point directly, telling The Hill, “It’s long understood what the dynamics are related to procedural votes connected to a rule.” The American Prospect noted on September 4 that Golden had other ways to bring his bill to the floor, so sinking the rule would not have killed it. All of that is fair, and it does not change the math. A party that demands loyalty on process owes its members a path to legislate on substance. The 193 Democrats who opposed this bill were voting on the merits, and they voted against help that Maine’s own fishing regulators had asked for.

Golden will not be in the next Congress. He announced in November 2025 that he would not seek reelection, writing that after eleven years he had “grown tired of the increasing incivility and plain nastiness that are now common from some elements of our American community,” and describing his family sitting in a hotel room on Thanksgiving after another threat against their home, as Politico reported.

The lobstermen got their vote in the House, and the Senate has not taken the bill up since. The congressman who was willing to pay the price to get it that far is going home, and Washington is still counting who held the line.

Visit Centercratic.party for more information.

Millions of Americans are hoping and dreaming of a miracle in November. They believe the Republicans have lost their way, so the Democrats will step in and set the country right. Now, before you get all enamored with that story, you had better ask the Democrats themselves whether they believe it.

They do not.

Nearly six in ten Democratic-aligned voters say their own party needs major changes or complete reform, according to CNN’s July 2026 polling.ⁱ The party sits around 40 percent favorable and 53 percent unfavorable in the current polling averages.ⁱⁱ That’s right. The rescue party cannot even sell itself to its own people.

And the country has already rendered its verdict on both of them. Pew Research found that 26 percent of Americans now hold an unfavorable view of both the Democrats and the Republicans at the same time, up from 21 percent in 2020.ⁱⁱⁱ The majority of Americans say both parties are too extreme, and fewer than half believe either one governs honestly and ethically, with the Republicans at 39 percent and the Democrats at 42.^iv

Let me remind you that the Democrats have their own version of MAGA, and it is the progressive movement. It runs on the same extremist fuel. It draws its power from intensity rather than breadth, punishes anyone who compromises, and treats the middle of the country as an obstacle instead of a constituency. Senator Bernie Sanders has endorsed more than sixty candidates in primaries across the country, as the New York Times reported, and he is doing it to lock his wing of the party into place for years after he is gone.^v He is 84 years old, he is not even a Democrat, and he may be the closest thing the Democratic Party has to anyone actually in charge.

That is not an attack on Bernie Sanders. He has been telling us exactly who he is for fifty years. The alarm here is that a party of this size, in a moment this serious, has nobody driving it. Ask ten Democrats who leads them today and you will get ten different answers. Senator Cory Booker said out loud what his colleagues say quietly, that the party has failed this moment.^vi Rahm Emanuel, a man who helped build the modern Democratic Party, is now going around the country making the case that it no longer works.^vii

So, this is where the two parties are today. One party captured by its most intense faction, another party captured by its most intense faction, and both of them telling you they are the only thing standing between you and disaster.

Now look at what the two of them have built together. In 1947 and 1948, the House passed 1,739 bills. In its most recent full term, it introduced a record 10,786 bills and yet passed only 777. The Senate once passed 2,550 bills in a single term. Last term it passed just 475.^viii

That is not gridlock, and we need to stop calling it that. Gridlock is what happens when two sides fight each other to a standstill. This is a dead branch of government. The one the Constitution put closest to the people has stopped doing the one job it exists to do, and the decline has continued for seventy years, across thirty-five elections and every combination of party control we have ever tried. We need laws that lower prescription costs, steady health care, and fix immigration. Congress is not passing them. Congress is not even writing them.

To make matters worse, that steady decline has allowed the legislative branch to let its authority slip away, and the executive branch has seized that authority and abused it in countless ways.

We keep swapping the players on the field and hoping for a better outcome. Neither of these parties is coming to save the game, because neither one is able to move back toward the center. That is why 45 percent of American adults no longer see themselves as Democrats or Republicans, according to Gallup’s January 2026 survey.^ix

If you believe our nation is in crisis and in need of a change, I encourage you to take a look at my new book, The Opening. In it, I lay out exactly how we got to where we are today, and more importantly, how we get this country back on track.

Learn more about the book: https://theopeningbook.com

References

1 CNN, “CNN Poll: Voters favor Democrats by an 8-point margin heading into the midterms,” July 30, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/30/politics/cnn-poll-2026-midterms

2 Fifty Plus One, “Democratic Party Favorability Polls and Average for 2026,” accessed September 11, 2026. https://fiftyplusone.news/polls/democratic-party-favorability

3 Pew Research Center, “Americans Continue to View Both the Republican and Democratic Parties Negatively,” May 1, 2026. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/05/01/americans-continue to-view-both-the-republican-and-democratic-parties-negatively/

4 Pew Research Center, “A Year Ahead of the Midterms, Americans’ Dim Views of Both Parties,” October 30, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/10/30/a-year-ahead-of-the midterms-americans-dim-views-of-both-parties/

5 The New York Times, “Bernie Sanders Backs Slate of Candidates in Bid to Cement Progressive Legacy,” May 15, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/15/us/politics/bernie-sanders endorsements.html

6 The Guardian, “Cory Booker says Democrats have ‘failed this moment’ and calls for new leaders,” March 29, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/29/cory-booker-democrats new-leadership

7 The Hill, “Rahm Emanuel makes case for change to a divided Democratic Party,” April 7, 2026. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5818596-rahm-emanuel-democrats-critic/

8 Paul J. Chapman, The Opening, Chapter 1, “Something Is Deeply Wrong,” drawing on legislative activity counts from Congress.gov. https://www.congress.gov/browse/legislation

9 Gallup, “New High of 45% in U.S. Identify as Political Independents,” January 12, 2026. https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-political-independents.aspx

On a stage in Dallas on the night of September 9, President Donald Trump told a Republican convention crowd exactly what was in it for them. “If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” he said, according to NPR, and then he gave the payment a name. “It will be called the Trump dividend,” he added.

The number is remarkable, but the condition attached to it is the shocking part. The money is not tied to a hardship, a shortfall, or a plan. It is tied to an election result.

What the president offered in Dallas was not a policy. It was a price, quoted in public, for a vote in November, and it arrives at a moment when this country can least afford it. The stunt it represents belongs to both parties, and it has slowly replaced the ordinary work of governing with the practice of moving money toward voters at the moment their ballots are being cast. Until Americans insist on a standard that forbids it, every election will be an auction, and the bidding will be done with money the government does not have.

Start with what this particular promise would cost. The Dallas Morning News reported that sending $5,000 to every adult American citizen would run well over $1 trillion, and CBC News put the figure near $1.35 trillion. NPR reported that the president offered no explanation of where the money would come from. Vice President JD Vance later pointed to tariff revenue, and Representative Chip Roy of Texas, a Republican, said, “I would like to know how they would plan to pay for . . . back of envelope . . . well over $1 trillion.” The Joint Economic Committee of Congress reported that the national debt stood at $40.10 trillion as of September 3, 2026.

This president has treated federal payments as personal property before. The Washington Post reported on April 14, 2020, that the Treasury Department directed that Donald Trump’s name be printed on the pandemic relief checks going out to millions of households, a step Axios noted was the first time a disbursement from the Internal Revenue Service carried a president’s name. Later that year, he signed a memorandum deferring the Social Security tax withheld from workers’ paychecks, and CNBC reported that the deferral ran from September 1 through December 31, 2020, covering the weeks on either side of the presidential election.

Democrats have engaged in their own version in the not-so-distant past. On August 24, 2022, less than three months before the midterm elections, which are the congressional elections held between presidential years, President Joe Biden announced he would cancel up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt for most borrowers and up to $20,000 for those who had received Pell grants. ABC News reported that the program would have benefited 43 million Americans at a cost of roughly $400 billion, and the Supreme Court struck it down by a vote of 6 to 3 on June 30, 2023. What the announcement never touched was the reason college costs so much in the first place. Two months later, the Associated Press reported that with three weeks left before those same elections, President Biden ordered the release of 15 million barrels of oil from the nation’s emergency petroleum reserve to push down gasoline prices, and he rejected the suggestion that the timing was political.

The pattern predates both of them, and the timing usually tells the story. In October 2009, The New York Times reported that President Barack Obama had called on Congress to send a second $250 payment to about 57 million Social Security recipients, veterans and people with disabilities. The proposal never landed in the hands of any Americans. On December 8, 2010, five weeks after the midterm elections, the House measure drew 254 votes and the Senate measure drew 53, and both died because each had been brought to the floor under a rule demanding far more than a simple majority. Democrats controlled both chambers that day, so the party that had promised the money also controlled the schedule and decided in the end not to deliver.

It is important to point out that direct payments are a legitimate tool of government, and that treating every one of them as vote buying would be wrong. Emergency relief during the pandemic reached families who had lost their income through no fault of their own, student debt is a real burden on millions of households, and any party is entitled to campaign on what it intends to do with public money. That objection holds, but only under one condition. A payment defended on its merits arrives with its cost, its funding source and its purpose attached, and it is timed to the needs of the country rather than to a campaign schedule. A payment promised only if one party wins fails every part of that test. That was precisely how this payment was announced: out loud, from a stage, to a cheering crowd.

There is a word in the English language for money offered to a person in exchange for a vote, and that word is not dividend.

The President signed a bill on Wednesday, September 2. Congress was already turning its attention away from Washington and toward the campaign trail.

The bill does not fund the government for the year ahead. It only makes sure that nobody in Washington has to fight about money until after the election.

Congress calls that a stopgap. Halftime is the better word for it.

The bill is H.R. 6500, the Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act of 2027. It freezes the federal government at last year’s spending levels through December 11, 2026, and it does not settle a single argument. The real fight over what the country spends this year got pushed into a five-week window after Election Day, and it goes back to the same Congress that could not finish the job in nine months. Both parties agreed to that because it protects their candidates. It does nothing for anyone else.

The word stopgap sounds harmless. It is not.

The formal name is a continuing resolution. It keeps last year’s dollar amounts in place for a set period instead of setting new ones. Congress is supposed to pass twelve separate full-year spending bills covering areas like defense, homeland security, energy, and housing, and all twelve are supposed to be signed into law before the federal budget year starts on October 1.

Not one of those twelve bills for 2027 had passed both chambers by the deadline. Not one. The stopgap fills the gap between the old year’s money running out and the new year’s bills getting written, and that is all it does.

So Congress cannot pass a budget. That is the story most people have heard, and yet it is only half true.

H.R. 6500 also contains non-budget line items. The bill blocks the Office of Management and Budget from finishing a rule that would let political appointees screen federal grants for political reasons. It bars any new money, including transfers between agencies, from going to immigration enforcement agencies. It stops the Defense Department from starting new production programs that were not already funded in 2026, while making exceptions for the Columbia-class and Virginia-class submarine programs, aircraft carrier refueling, and other high-priority military work.

And there is more. The bill keeps dozens of programs alive that were about to expire, including the National Flood Insurance Program, highway and transportation spending, veterans’ health and housing programs, the Technology Modernization Fund, cybersecurity information-sharing laws, and the African Growth and Opportunity Act. It keeps SNAP food assistance and WIC running at current levels, with a thirty-day grace period so a future lapse would not cut off benefits right away. It delays a change to the federal definition of hemp. It also freezes cost-of-living pay raises for members of Congress.

That is a tremendous amount of work, negotiated across two chambers and two parties in a matter of weeks.

Now compare that with the rest of this year. The same Congress that could not send a single one of its twelve annual spending bills to the President managed to put all of that together in a matter of weeks, united by a shared goal: moving an uncomfortable subject past the election.

The vote count puts a spotlight on this story. The Senate passed the bill 90 to 6 in early August, right before leaving town for its recess. The House passed it 370 to 48 on Tuesday, September 1.

We all witnessed how both parties can work together when they want to. They can move fast, and by huge margins, when they want to avoid a fight in front of the voters and quickly escape Washington for the campaign trails.

Nobody hid the reason, either. House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole said the bill “will allow Congress time to get past the November elections, and allow us time to assess and move forward with further appropriations measures in November and December.” Politico and CNN reported the same thing. The stopgap lets sitting members campaign through Election Day on November 3 without a shutdown fight producing bad headlines.

When Congress misses a deadline, the usual explanation is that the other party made it impossible. That is not what happened here. The people who wrote the bill said plainly that the deadline was set around the campaign calendar.

Now look at what is waiting after the election.

Between Election Day and December 11 there are about five weeks. In that time Congress has to write and pass twelve full-year spending bills that it could not finish in the previous nine months.

The election results will hang over every hour of it. Control of the House is on the ballot, and who wins changes how much leverage each side thinks it has going into the December deadline.

If there is no full-year deal and no new stopgap by December 11, the money runs out again. A shutdown becomes possible in the weeks before the holidays.

Here is the part that is most concerning. The current Congress handles that deadline, not the incoming one, because the new Congress is not sworn in until January. Final spending levels for 2027 will be set in part by members who lost on November 3 and who will never face those voters again.

Think of the year as a football season, because that is how it has played out.

The 2026 season has run all year. There have been plays and penalties, scorekeeping, injuries, and roster changes, and the country has watched every quarter of it.

The whistle has now blown. The halftime show runs from today until November 3, and it will be loud, expensive, and well rehearsed.

Then comes the second half, and that is the bloody one. That is where the 2027 budget actually gets decided, on a short clock, by a roster that is partly on its way out the door.

The problem is not that the people in Congress are bad people. The problem is that neither party has any incentive to bring forth a bipartisan budget. Our two parties are built to win the next election. Both sides will treat the post-election budget negotiations as a campaign tool first and as a governing job second.

That is the gap the Centercratic Party was built to fill. The party is founded on nine principles that hold whether they help win an election or cost one, and three of those principles tie directly to this.

The first principle is to safeguard our democratic system, which means governing through compromise instead of domination. The Constitution assumes compromise. What the country just watched was two parties compromising on one thing only, which was the timing of their next fight.

The fifth principle is to debate with facts and dignity, which means arguing over facts, treating each other with respect, admitting where the real disagreements are, and refusing personal attacks and bad-faith tactics. That is not what the first eight months of this year looked like. Eight months in, the two parties have almost nothing to show for their work, and not one of the twelve spending bills has cleared both chambers. A shutdown fight was judged too costly to hold before the election because both sides knew exactly how it would be conducted.

The sixth principle is to seek unity through broad support, which means building policies that earn wide and lasting agreement. A bill that passes 90 to 6 and 370 to 48 is not wide agreement on a budget. It is wide agreement on putting the budget off.

You can read the full set of principles at Centercratic.party.

There are times when a stopgap bill makes sense. Shutdowns do real damage. Federal workers miss paychecks, services people count on stop, contractors go unpaid, and families living close to the edge get hurt the worst. A Congress that keeps the lights on while it works through a hard negotiation is behaving better than one that lets the money run out to make a point.

That argument would hold up if the delay were being used to get the work done. It is not. Nothing in H.R. 6500 requires a single one of the twelve bills to move during the fifteen weeks it buys, no committee has to produce anything, and the same fights that stalled everything in the spring will be waiting in November with far less time to settle them.

Moving a deadline does not settle anything.

The timing argument breaks down for another reason. The people who negotiate the December deal are the members serving right now, including the ones voters just decided to send home. Voters will have spoken, and the same people will still be making the call.

Avoiding a shutdown is worth doing. Avoiding a shutdown to duck a fight you were elected to have is something else, and voters have a right to know which one they got.

The halftime show is underway. For the next two months both teams will tell the country that the other one is the reason nothing gets done, and then on December 12, Americans could wake up to a closed government, shut down by the same people who proved in September that they can keep it open any time it suits them.

The press office of Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa recently posted a message on X announcing that the senator had completed his forty-sixth consecutive year of face-to-face meetings with Iowans in all ninety-nine counties. The post was written as a celebration, and in one narrow sense it is one, because very few politicians keep a promise for four and a half decades. What that number actually measures, though, is not diligence. It measures how long one man has held one seat.

Iowans have every reason to appreciate a senator who shows up in every county, year after year, including the small ones that most officeholders drive past. The question the X post raises, and does not answer, is whether any single person should hold the same office for that long.

Senator Grassley has served in the Senate since January 1981 and has held a seat in Congress since 1975, and he has given no sign of stopping. In mid-August 2026 he filed an early statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission, which is the routine paperwork that allows a politician to keep raising money for a future race. He turns 93 this month. If he seeks and wins a ninth term in 2028, he would be 95 on Election Day and 102 at the end of that term.

The argument of this opinion piece is simple, and it is not about one man’s health or one state’s choice. Forty-six years in a single seat is not an achievement, it is entrenchment, and it is the predictable outcome of a system that places no limit on how long a person may hold power. The Centercratic Party believes the answer is a firm cap of eighteen years of service in either chamber of Congress and a retirement age of eighty, and this fall, while one seat in Iowa is being decided by one family’s timetable, is exactly the moment to say so.

Consider what the senator himself has said about his plans. Asked directly on August 28 whether he intends to run again, Senator Grassley said he is focused on the coming midterm elections and told the interviewer to ask him next year. He has indicated he will announce by this fall whether he will seek a ninth term, and he has said he hopes voters will not judge him by his age. In the meantime, he is running the Senate Judiciary Committee as its chairman, and he has invited former special counsel Jack Smith to testify before that committee on September 22.

None of this is the conduct of a man preparing to hand anything over. What makes the situation more striking is the name most often mentioned as his eventual successor. Pat Grassley, the senator’s grandson, is 43 years old, serves as Speaker of the Iowa House, and was born two years after his grandfather entered the Senate. A seat held by one family since 1981 may simply pass to another member of that family, and in the language of American politics that is described as passing the torch. It is not. Passing the torch means letting go of it in time for someone else to be chosen on their own merits.

It would be unfair to treat Iowa as an outlier, because it is not. Newsweek published an analysis of legislator birth records on July 13, 2026, prompted by the death of Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina at 71, and it found that the average sitting senator is 65.1 years old and the median is 66. That analysis counted 36 senators aged 70 or older, eight aged 80 or older, and one in his nineties, who is Senator Grassley. The eight who have passed 80 are Senator Grassley of Iowa at 92, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont at 84, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky at 84, Senator James Risch of Idaho at 83, Senator Angus King of Maine at 82, Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois at 81, Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut at 80, and Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts at 80.

Newsweek also reported that 131 members of the House and Senate together are 70 or older, which is nearly one quarter of Congress. NBC News reported that Senator Risch will be 83 on Election Day this year and would be 89 at the end of a new six-year term, that Senator King would turn 86 during his next race in 2030, and that Senator Sanders would turn 89 in that same year. Length of service tells the same story from a different angle.

The SenatorDB seniority ranking for the 119th Congress lists Senator Grassley in the Senate since January 3, 1981, Senator McConnell since 1985, Senator Patty Murray of Washington since 1993, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon since 1996, and Senator Susan Collins of Maine, Senator Durbin, and Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island since 1997. This is not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. It is a shared arrangement that both parties have found comfortable.

The usual reply is that voters already hold the remedy in their hands, and that anyone who has served too long can be sent home in November. That reply describes a country the United States no longer is. When the Cook Political Report first published its Partisan Voting Index in 1996, a measure of how competitive each congressional district is, it counted 164 House districts where either party had a genuine chance to win. By 2024 that count had fallen to 42 seats out of 435, a decline of 74 percent in less than thirty years. In that same year, House incumbents were reelected at a rate of roughly 97 percent.

When a district is drawn so that only one party can win it, the general election no longer decides anything, and the only contest that can remove a member is that party’s own primary, which is the internal election in which registered members of a party choose their nominee. Roughly 10 percent of eligible Americans vote in primaries, and those voters are the most committed and most ideological slice of the electorate. Under those conditions, telling voters that they can simply retire a forty-six-year incumbent whenever they choose is not a description of how the system works. It is a description of how it once worked.

Americans have already reached their own verdict on this. A CNN poll released on July 29, 2026 found that 58 percent of Americans consider the current share of elderly lawmakers in Congress a major problem, a figure that rises to 68 percent among Americans under 35, and that 70 percent of people aligned with either major party would be uneasy or upset if their own party nominated someone over the age of 70. A Fox News poll conducted in July found that 85 percent of registered voters believe there should be a mandatory retirement age for lawmakers, and about half of that group would set it below 70.

A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found support for an age limit for federal elected officials among 82 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of Democrats. Nor would such a rule be a novelty in American government. Newsweek reported that 37 states already impose term limits on their governors and 16 impose them on their state legislators. The states figured this out. Congress, which would have to impose the limit on itself, has not.

This is the gap the Centercratic Party was built to fill. The party is founded on nine principles that hold regardless of who is winning, and the second speaks directly to this moment: limit terms for accountability, impose term limits on public office to prevent entrenchment, and keep representatives answerable to the voters rather than to their own careers. In practice that means eighteen years in the House, eighteen years in the Senate, and a hard stop at the age of eighty.

Eighteen years is three full Senate terms and nine House terms, which is more than enough time for any capable person to learn the institution, chair a committee, and leave a record behind. It also means that a seat becomes an open contest on a known schedule rather than whenever an incumbent decides he is finished, and that a state’s next senator is chosen by its voters instead of inherited. The full set of principles is posted at Centercratic.party.

It is important to call out that experience in government is invaluable, because writing law, running a committee, and negotiating across party lines are difficult skills that take years to build. States that adopted strict legislative term limits have found that power shifts toward unelected staff members and toward lobbyists, who stay after the elected members leave and who know the rules better than the newcomers do. A House member restricted to just a few years in office may never accumulate enough standing to accomplish anything, and voters who want to keep a good representative are entitled to ask why a rule should override their judgment.

Those concerns are the reason the Centercratic Party limit is set at eighteen years rather than six or twelve. That length preserves genuine expertise while ending careers that outlast the problems they were elected to solve. The objection loses its force entirely at the far end of the curve, because whatever institutional knowledge is gained between year eighteen and year forty-six is purchased at the cost of a seat that an entire generation of Iowans has never once had the chance to compete for.

Senator Grassley has visited all ninety-nine counties in Iowa every year for forty-six years. In all that time, he has never once found in any of them a single Iowan he judged ready to take his place.

Every American who owns a phone also owns a calculator, because it came free as an app on the phone. The Democratic Socialists of America spent this summer writing a platform that would hand the federal government trillions of dollars in new bills to pay, and there is not one number anywhere in it. Apparently nobody bothered to open the app, let alone bring in the financial experts who could tell them what we are actually dealing with here.

This platform carries real weight. The Democratic Socialists of America has roughly 120,000 members, which makes it the largest socialist organization in American history, and its candidates are winning primaries and will be on ballots this November.

So voters are owed an answer to one simple question. If a group will not say what its own promises cost, why would anyone hand it the checkbook? There are only two explanations. Either these candidates do not know what they are proposing to spend, which means they cannot be trusted with a budget, or they know and decided voters were better off not seeing it.

Look at what they are promising. The Dallas Express, in a summary published in July, listed the main items: federal health insurance with no premiums or co-pays, government-owned energy and transit systems, government-owned housing with rent control everywhere, free college and the cancellation of every student loan in the country, free childcare, and a 32-hour workweek at full pay.

Not one of those items comes with a price, a tax plan or a timeline.

Someone else ran the numbers for them. According to an analysis by economist Adam N. Michel of the Cato Institute, the full platform would cost between $71 trillion and $212 trillion over ten years. That is roughly 18 to 53 percent of the entire American economy, on top of everything Washington already spends.

Michel also tested the answer the DSA gives whenever anyone asks who pays, which is that the rich will. He calculated what happens if you take everything they have. Wiping out every dollar of corporate profit in America and seizing the entire net worth of the Forbes 400 would still leave the plan short by $29 trillion to $169 trillion.

Health care alone makes the point. The Urban Institute and the Commonwealth Fund put the 10-year federal cost of a single government health plan at $27.5 trillion to $35 trillion, and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculated in 2020 that it would run $2.5 trillion to $3.5 trillion a year. The entire federal deficit this year is projected to be about $2 trillion.

Then there is the condition of the government that would have to pay for all of this. Peter Coy reported in The New York Times DealBook in May that federal debt held by the public, meaning money the government borrowed and has to pay back with interest, has passed 100 percent of everything the country produces in a year.

The last time that happened, soldiers were coming home from the Second World War, and the debt came down quickly afterward. This time the Congressional Budget Office projects it climbing to 175 percent by 2056.

Coy also reported that the 30-year Treasury bond now yields 5.12 percent, the highest since 2007, and that the government spends more on interest than it spends on the entire military. Every dollar of this platform would have to be borrowed on top of that, and nobody selling it has said so.

Other countries have already tried this, and the results are public. Argentina paid for popular promises with borrowed and printed money for years. Its national statistics agency, INDEC, reported inflation of 211 percent in 2023, the highest in three decades, with roughly four in ten Argentines living in poverty.

Greece shows how fast the bill can come due in a modern economy. The European Court of Auditors’ record of that crisis shows the government closing the banks and limiting how much of their own money people could take out on June 28, 2015. The Guardian reported that same week that Greek pharmacies were short of medicine and grocers were short of food.

In those countries the promises were popular, the costs were never published, and working families paid the difference.

There is a bigger problem underneath the numbers, and it is about character. This same platform calls for abolishing the United States Senate, ending the Electoral College, and replacing the presidency and the Supreme Court with an executive and a judiciary that answer to Congress. Co-chair Megan Romer went on Fox News and confirmed the Senate position was real, answering “true” when she was asked directly.

Think about that combination. A group wants to take apart two branches of the federal government, and it will not publish the cost of its own spending plan. Nothing inside that organization requires a promise to add up before a candidate carries it door to door.

Making a promise to people who will be handed the bill, and never showing them the bill, is not a shortcut. It is dishonest. No political organization should operate in this manner.

The Centercratic Party was built on nine principles that hold whether an election is close or not, and the seventh one speaks directly to this matter. It calls for governing with a balanced approach, rejecting both government overreach and government absence, providing essential services, measuring results, ending what fails, and enforcing fiscal discipline.

For a candidate, that means no proposal goes public without a funding plan attached to it, and the numbers have to add up where voters can see them. Visit centercratic.party to see all nine principles and how they protect our democracy.

Supporters of the Democratic Socialists of America platform may respond that this is strictly a platform, a wish list and not a budget, and that the Democrats and the Republicans do not put real price tags on their promises either. In full disclosure, Cato opposes socialism, and Michel called his own estimate rough.

All of that is true, and none of it lets the DSA off the hook. The only people who could tell the country what these programs cost are the people who wrote them, and they never tried. When outside estimates run from $27.5 trillion to $212 trillion, that is not a disagreement over details. That is the difference between a plan and a wish.

How could we possibly give the Democratic Socialists of America license to govern this country when they have not demonstrated even the slightest fiscal responsibility for the programs they are proposing? The Treasury Department reported this month that the national debt has passed $40 trillion, and the cost of even one of these programs, if it is not handled with great care, would be catastrophic on top of that.

How could we?

Reuters reported that the Treasury Department’s daily ledger of what the federal government owes stood at $40.047 trillion on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 18. No country in the history of the world has ever owed that much money. The ledger was posted the way it is posted every business day, with no announcement and no ceremony, and nothing about this country’s politics changed because of it.

In the days that followed, candidates in both parties went back to talking about grocery bills and health insurance premiums. Almost none of them explained to voters that the government’s own borrowing is one of the reasons those bills keep climbing.

So consider where this country actually stands as it heads into a national election. The debt has passed $40 trillion. The account that pays Social Security retirement benefits is scheduled to run empty in 2032, the account that pays for Medicare hospital care is scheduled to run empty in 2033, and the government will hit its legal borrowing ceiling sometime in 2027. Not one of those facts is a theme of the November campaign, not a major theme and not a minor one. This is not two parties disagreeing about how to solve a hard problem. This is two parties agreeing, without ever saying so out loud, that the problem belongs to somebody who comes later.

Start with how fast this happened, because the speed is the part almost nobody has absorbed. The Associated Press reported that the country crossed $39 trillion in March and $38 trillion last October. That means it took five months to add the most recent trillion, and five months to add the one before that. Al Jazeera reported that in May 2023 the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan agency that keeps the government’s books for Congress, expected the country to reach $40 trillion in 2028. We got there two years early. A tsunami is nearly invisible in open water and only becomes obvious at the shoreline, when there is no longer time to move. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan budget watchdog, noted that the debt has doubled in ten years and quadrupled in less than twenty. The country needed nearly two hundred years to borrow its first trillion dollars, which it did in 1981.

A number that large stops meaning anything, so picture it this way. Lisa Desjardins of PBS News Hour reported that the debt is now worth more than every single-family home in America put together. Al Jazeera, citing the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, reported that it works out to roughly $297,000 for every household in the country.

Where it goes from here is worse, and the projections are not secret. In its February 2026 Budget and Economic Outlook, the Congressional Budget Office projected that debt held by the public will equal 101 percent of annual national output this year, climb to 110 percent within five years, and reach 120 percent by 2036. That would break the American record of 106 percent set at the end of the Second World War. In dollars, that 2036 figure is roughly $56 trillion. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, working from the same projections, calculated that the debt reaches 144 percent of the economy within twenty years. The House Budget Committee, summarizing the Congressional Budget Office’s long-range data, reported that gross federal debt is on course to hit $182 trillion by 2056. Desjardins reported that the country will pass $50 trillion within a few short years. None of those figures assume a recession, a market panic or a new war. They assume the government keeps doing exactly what it is doing now, which is the part people miss about a wave like this. It does not need anything to go wrong in order to arrive.

The interest on all of this is already crowding out the government Americans think they are paying for. The Congressional Budget Office projected that net interest costs will pass $1 trillion this year and more than double to $2.1 trillion by 2036, and the House Budget Committee reported that interest alone will exceed everything Congress votes on each year by 2038. Reuters reported that fiscal year 2025 was the first year in which servicing the debt cost more than the entire Pentagon budget. Reuters also reported that during the first ten months of fiscal 2026, interest passed Medicare to become the second-largest item in the federal budget, behind only Social Security. Muhammad Ali Nasir, a professor of economics at the University of Leeds, wrote in The Conversation that interest now takes roughly 14 to 15 percent of all federal spending. That money does not fix a bridge, train a worker, treat a patient or lower anyone’s premium. It rents the past.

Then come the deadlines, and these ought to be the center of every debate this fall. The Social Security and Medicare Trustees released their annual reports on June 9, 2026. A trust fund is a dedicated savings account the government keeps for one program, and these two are running out. The Trustees project that the fund paying retirees and their survivors will be depleted in the fourth quarter of 2032, at which point payroll taxes would cover 78 percent of promised benefits. They project that the Medicare fund covering hospital stays will be depleted in the second quarter of 2033, leaving enough for about 89 percent of costs. Both dates moved a quarter closer than they were a year ago. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that holding those retirement benefits to available revenue would mean average cuts of 28 percent, and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculated that a typical couple who is 60 years old today would lose about $18,400. The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates that the government will run into its $41.1 trillion borrowing limit between late winter and midsummer of 2027. The Congress elected this November will face all of it in its first year, whether it campaigned on it or not.

That is a frightening picture, and every American with children or grandchildren has a stake in it. You would expect candidates for the Senate and the House to be competing right now over who has the most credible plan to deal with it. That is not remotely what is happening.

What is happening instead is a campaign about everything else, and often about things that would make the arithmetic worse. In late July, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries launched an agenda called “Fighting for an Affordable America,” and Democratic primaries this year brought back Medicare for All, the proposal to replace private health insurance with a single federal program. An analysis published on August 24 by Stephen Parente of the American Action Forum put the net cost of that program at $2.5 trillion in 2027, rising to roughly $5.9 trillion a year by 2036. Over that decade the total comes to $47.4 trillion if no new revenue is raised to cover it. Voters are entitled to hear where $47 trillion comes from before they are asked to vote for it. Meanwhile the country is fighting a war with no clear way out. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the Senate Appropriations Committee on July 21 that the war with Iran had cost the Defense Department about $37.5 billion so far, and the White House sent Congress a request for $87.6 billion in emergency funding in late June. Every dollar of that is borrowed.

Republicans are not treating this seriously either. White House spokesman Kush Desai has said the administration is focused on cutting waste, fraud and abuse while speeding up economic growth. Reuters reported that most of the administration’s reductions have landed on the part of the budget Congress votes on each year, which is the smaller part. Roughly 60 percent of the $7 trillion the government spends annually goes to programs that grow automatically, without any vote at all. Margaret Spellings, president and chief executive of the Bipartisan Policy Center, said the biggest items in the federal budget “are all running on autopilot.” Reuters also reported that the debt grew by $8.4 trillion during President Biden’s term and by $11.6 trillion across President Trump’s two terms, and that the Congressional Budget Office estimates the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will add another $4.7 trillion.

The voters are not the ones who are confused here. A Peter G. Peterson Foundation survey released on August 24 found that 96 percent of voters say they are more likely to support a candidate who has a plan to address the debt, and that 86 percent say such a plan factors into their vote. Support ran above 90 percent among Democrats, Republicans and independents alike. The public is asking for this, and the parties are not supplying it, because neither party has ever agreed to be bound by anything that would force it to.

That is the hole the Centercratic Party was built to fill. The party is founded on nine principles, and the seventh speaks directly to this moment: govern with a balanced approach, reject both government overreach and government absence, provide essential services, measure results, end what fails, and enforce fiscal discipline. Rejecting overreach means you do not launch a program carrying a $47 trillion price tag with no financing plan attached to it. Rejecting absence means you do not stand aside and let a 28 percent cut hit retirees in 2032 by operation of law, because letting a program collapse on schedule is not restraint, it is abandonment. Measuring results means a program has to prove it works with evidence rather than with the good intentions of the people who wrote it. Ending what fails means the programs that do not work get retired, which is the hardest act in Washington and the one almost never performed. Enforcing fiscal discipline means the numbers have to close, in public, on the same page as the promise.

Apply that standard consistently over the last ten years and the country’s fiscal position looks very different today. A war gets paid for or it gets debated on its cost. A new benefit arrives with its funding source printed beside it. The trust funds get repaired while there are still options that do not cut a retiree’s check by more than a quarter.

The fair objection is that people have warned about this debt for forty years and the collapse never came. The dollar is still the world’s reserve currency, demand for Treasury securities has held American borrowing costs down, and cutting spending or raising taxes all at once would hit families who are already stretched. That is why the Centercratic answer is a correction phased in over years, announced far enough ahead that people can plan around it. But the ground under that objection is moving. Nasir reported that the dollar’s share of global currency reserves has fallen from roughly 70 percent in 2001 to nearly 57 percent today, and that the yield on the thirty-year Treasury bond hit 5.34 percent on August 21, its highest in two decades. Spellings said the current path “is plainly unsustainable, and that’s the best-case scenario,” and warned that a recession or a global conflict could turn a problem into a crisis. The country is already in the conflict.

The nine principles, and what they would mean for the rest of what Washington has left unfinished, are at centercratic.party.

The ledger will be posted again tomorrow afternoon, and the number will be larger. The people who will pay for it are sitting in classrooms right now, and nobody on this November’s ballot is speaking for them.

Standing before his country on Saturday, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada told Canadians they were “at war” with the United States, and then he told them why. “We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed,” he said, as reported by The New York Times. “We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.”

He was talking about the country Canada sells the most to and has trusted the longest. Days earlier, on the other side of the world, South Korea learned the same lesson about the same signature after seventy-three years under an American security treaty.

In the space of about a week in August, the United States government did serious and possibly permanent damage to two of the most valuable partnerships it holds. On August 17, according to The Washington Post, President Trump directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “substantially reduce” the joint military exercises that American and South Korean forces run together, the rehearsals that allow the two armies to fight side by side if the North attacks.

Four days later, after telling the public twice that a trade agreement with Canada was in hand, he let tariffs of 50 percent fall on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods. The words he chose in both cases told every government watching that an American commitment can be pulled back on a Sunday evening over a personal grievance. That lesson will outlast this presidency, and the next president will inherit it rather than erase it. The Centercratic Party regards this as a failure of American character before it is a failure of policy.

The break with Canada came out of a negotiation both sides said was nearly finished. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board described it on August 23, the president reached for Section 338 of the 1930 Tariff Act, a law that permits tariffs of up to 50 percent against countries found to discriminate against American commerce, and the Journal noted that no previous president had ever used it. A deal was still within reach that week. The United States trade representative, Jamieson Greer, told The New York Times that Washington had offered to lower its tariffs on steel, aluminum and automobiles and to drop a recent tariff on Canadian lumber.

Carney said the talks died because American negotiators arrived late with terms he called “unfair, uneconomic” and “called into question the reliability of any deal.” Those late demands, according to The New York Times, included changes to Canada’s rules requiring French-language labeling on packaging and Canadian content in streaming services. French is an official language of Canada, and a country’s own language laws have nothing to do with a tariff dispute.

Americans are paying much of this bill. The Wall Street Journal editorial board reported that prices for steel and aluminum mill products have risen 22.5 percent and 40.5 percent over the past year, and that General Motors projected a hit of $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion this year from tariffs. The Journal also reported that American distillers asked the administration to hold off, because the longer Canada keeps American whiskey off its shelves, the harder those shelves become to win back.

Canada’s answer arrives on September 8, when, as The New York Times reported, it begins collecting tariffs of 50, 25 and 15 percent on roughly 700 American products, doubling its tariff on American steel and aluminum to 50 percent and reaching everything from aluminum foil to dishwashers to railway locomotives. In a separate editorial on August 19, the Journal reported that the most exposed states are largely Republican ones. Texas traded $303 billion in goods with Mexico in 2025 by that account, nearly 70 percent of what Michigan exports goes to Canada or Mexico, and Iowa and Maine each send half their exports to those two markets. Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee wrote in a July letter, quoted by the Journal, that Canada and Mexico had increased their purchases of American farm goods by $20 billion since the trade agreement took effect in 2020, reaching $60 billion in 2024.

The Korea decision follows the same pattern with far higher stakes. The exercise the president cut short, called Ulchi Freedom Shield, was an eleven-day drill scheduled to run from August 17 to August 27 involving roughly 18,000 South Korean troops practicing responses to missile strikes, drone incursions and cyberattacks, as The Guardian reported. That same report traced the alliance to the 1953 Mutual Defense Treaty signed after the Korean War armistice and put the number of American troops still stationed there at roughly 28,500.

The president justified the reduction by citing his “very good relationship” with Kim Jong Un and describing the drills as sending “a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” to a country he called “unthreatening and respectful.” His own administration’s 2026 Annual Threat Assessment, The Guardian noted, describes an “increasingly confident North Korean regime” whose weapons threaten the United States, South Korea and Japan, and Tulsi Gabbard, then his director of national intelligence, testified in March that North Korea’s intercontinental missiles “can already reach US soil.”

The Washington Post reported that American officials and outside experts estimate the North holds fifty to sixty nuclear warheads, and The Guardian reported that North Korea fired ten missiles the day after the drills were curtailed. The reason he gave for the order matters more than the order itself. Speaking in the Oval Office, according to The Washington Post, he said he had asked the South Korean president for help defending the Strait of Hormuz and was refused. “We have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong Un, your next-door neighbor, and you’re not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran?” he recalled saying. “I see. Well, why are we involved in helping you?” That is the same ally Secretary Hegseth praised in May, as the Wall Street Journal noted, for its “pragmatism and leadership” in raising defense spending to 3.5 percent of its economic output.

The pattern with Canada is the same. The New York Times has reported that the president repeatedly proposed annexing the country as a fifty-first state, called the border an arbitrary line, said Canada only “lives because of the United States,” and wrote on Truth Social that Canada wanted “the benefits of being a State, without being one.” Deterrence rests on a simple belief among allies that Americans mean what they say, and these two weeks spent down that belief in both capitals.

Congress has mostly stood aside while this happened. The Guardian reported the objections of Senator Jack Reed, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who called the order “another inane, haphazard decision,” and of Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, who said that “hollowing out these joint exercises is shortsighted and a mistake.” Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey said the decision suggested “a disregard for this relationship.”

Exactly one Republican senator was quoted objecting, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who wrote that reducing the exercises “does nothing more than free up thousands of North Korea’s troops to support Putin’s” war in Ukraine, and Senator Tillis is on his way out of the Senate. When the only member of the president’s party willing to say this out loud is a man with no more elections ahead of him, the silence of the rest is about fear rather than conviction. The Republican Party will answer for letting it get this far.

There is a real case for the pressure, and it begins with a record both parties built. For decades, presidents of both parties accepted trade rules and defense arrangements tilted against American workers and taxpayers, and they left the imbalances for their successors to solve. Canada protects its dairy market, its provinces have restricted sales of American alcohol, and allied defense budgets stayed too low for too long.

This president is willing to force those conversations, and the pressure has produced results, including South Korea’s move to 3.5 percent of output on defense. The case falls apart on method, because pressure built on insult buys one concession and costs a generation of goodwill. American distillers asked him to hold off, American automakers lobbied for a truce, and the administration went ahead anyway.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board, which has argued for open markets and a strong defense for a century, called the Korea order “an act of appeasement” and called the Canadian escalation the dumbest trade war in history. A fix that holds would be an agreement both countries sign and keep. By late August, the result was a collapsed negotiation and an allied prime minister telling his citizens they were at war with the United States.

When the two parties govern without guardrails, without values, and without principles, there is nothing to stop either of them from doing whatever the moment rewards. Over time, these rewards chip away at the foundation of our democracy. That is why the Centercratic Party is based on nine principles that are adhered to regardless of the political situation at hand. Three of those principles apply directly to what happened over these two weeks.

The fifth principle requires that we debate with facts and dignity, acknowledge disagreements, and refuse personal attacks and bad-faith tactics, which rules out settling an alliance dispute through a social media post. The eighth principle requires that we unite with allies to deter aggression and defend free nations against military, cyber and economic threats, which treats allies as partners in global strength rather than expenses to be trimmed. The ninth principle requires that we exemplify global leadership through dignified, restrained and humane conduct at home and abroad, and the words of the past two weeks did the opposite, calling a nuclear-armed hereditary dictator respectful while treating a democracy of fifty million people as ungrateful.

Yes, Prime Minister Carney told Canadians that America’s signature is now written in pencil. But by then, Canadians had been given plenty of reason to reach that conclusion themselves.

Visit centercratic.party for more information.

This month, in two cities roughly a thousand miles apart, two rooms full of people met to debate the direction of the Democratic Party, and the two meetings had almost nothing to say to each other. In Chicago, delegates of the Democratic Socialists of America gathered at McCormick Place, and CNN reported that they spent the weekend planning their next steps toward taking over the Democratic Party and taking down capitalism. In Austin, at the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting, former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe delivered a very different message, telling members, as Ken Thomas of The Wall Street Journal reported on August 15, “Enough of the hand-wringing. Enough of the lemon-sucking. We are in the best political position we have been in a decade.”

Neither of those gatherings was convened by the man whose stated job is to win control of the House of Representatives on November 3. Neither produced anything the other room agreed to, and neither answered the question a voter has every right to ask this fall.

That question is simple. Who is actually in charge of the Democratic Party? With roughly ten weeks left before the midterm elections, the answer is also simple: nobody is. That is not the personal failing of any one Democrat. Neither major party was ever built with a leader at the top, because the position does not exist.

The Democratic National Committee handles money, rules, and the nominating convention. Congressional leaders manage their own caucuses on Capitol Hill and nothing wider than that. When a party holds the White House, the president speaks for it, sets its direction, and disciplines the members who stray, so nobody notices the gap. When the party loses the White House, no one inherits that role, because the role was never an actual position in the party.

Out of power, three figures are now behaving as though they hold the wheel. Hakeem Jeffries manages the House Democratic Caucus, which is the whole of the job, and it gives him no standing to speak for the party beyond it. Bernie Sanders holds the energy of the party’s fastest-growing faction and is not a registered Democrat. Kamala Harris holds the party’s most recent presidential nomination and no office at all. The result is a party with no authoritative voice, no agreed agenda, and no plan for what it would do with a majority if voters hand it one. That unresolved fight will not disappear on election night. It will surface in January of 2027, when the same people who could not agree in August will be expected to organize a Congress.

Consider the position Jeffries occupied on Meet the Press on August 16. Kristen Welker opened by noting that seven Democratic incumbent House members have lost their seats this cycle, including some Jeffries himself had endorsed, who lost to more progressive candidates. Asked whether Democratic socialists belong in his party, Jeffries said, “I don’t support the DSA agenda as has been articulated by the DSA itself,” and he listed what he opposes, including defunding the police, open borders, and abolishing the Senate. In nearly the same breath, he said that DSA-aligned candidates who won Democratic primaries and win in November “will be part of the House Democratic Caucus.” In other words, he rejects their agenda and will still welcome the members who campaigned on it. That is not a position on anything. It is an effort to reassure moderate voters while avoiding a fight with a faction whose turnout he needs on Election Day.

The same balancing act showed up on policy. Welker pressed Jeffries on Medicare for All, the proposal to replace private health insurance with a single government plan covering everyone. He co-sponsored that legislation from 2013 until 2021, stopped co-sponsoring it when he became leader, and told Welker plainly that he does not support it now, while declining to say whether he would allow a vote on it as Speaker. He took a similar path on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency that arrests and deports people living in the country illegally, which many Democratic candidates have campaigned on abolishing. Jeffries called for reform rather than abolition, and would not commit to bringing an abolition bill to the floor. A leader who cannot say what his own caucus will vote on in January is not setting an agenda. He is postponing one.

Into that vacuum has stepped a senator who does not belong to the party. Lisa Lerer and Katie Glueck of The New York Times reported on August 16 that Sanders, the Vermont independent, championed progressive candidates across the country this year, including Abdul El-Sayed, who won the Michigan Senate primary, and Peggy Flanagan, who won the Minnesota Senate primary by a double-digit margin. In Maine, after Graham Platner withdrew from the Senate race, Reuters reported that state Democrats nominated former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson on July 25 to replace him, and both the Associated Press and the New York Post described Jackson as the candidate the party’s left, led by Sanders, had rallied behind. Rahm Emanuel, the longtime Democratic official, put the oddity of this arrangement bluntly in remarks aired on Meet the Press, saying of the Chicago convention, “You’re not Democrats. You’re a separate party. I’ll see you in November.”

The third claimant is running something closer to a shadow campaign. Nevada Democrats hosted former Vice President Harris for a fireside chat in Las Vegas in May, one of several such appearances this year, and the events have been widely read as the early architecture of a 2028 presidential run. Substance follows the travel. Welker noted on Meet the Press that Harris has called for expanding the Supreme Court to thirteen justices, a proposal Jeffries would not endorse when asked, saying instead that he supports requiring an ethics code for the justices. The party’s most recent nominee is therefore campaigning on a position the leader of House Democrats declines to take, and no one in the party has the standing to settle which of them is speaking for it.

A strong, well-funded organization might be able to carry this much confusion into an election. The Democratic Party is not in that position. The Wall Street Journal reported that the DNC ended June with more than $18 million in debt and about $16 million in cash, while the Republican National Committee ended the same month with $128 million and no debt. Even the party’s own leaders are describing different targets. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she wants Democrats to win at least 30 seats, while Jeffries told Welker only that he would work to reach 218 and then win as many above that as possible. The faction pulling hardest on the party has also not proven it can win where control is actually decided. Nate Cohn and C.J. Robinson of The New York Times reported on August 4 that no candidate endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America or Justice Democrats has won a primary in a battleground district or state this cycle. Their victories have come in places that were already safely Democratic, which are not the places that determine who runs the House.

The absence of a single national leader is a familiar condition for an American party out of power, and in 2026 the consequences are unusually visible. But the Democrats have an answer to all of this. DNC Vice Chair Reyna Walters-Morgan told The Wall Street Journal in Austin, “Voters don’t care about internal squabbles.” Chair Ken Martin made the companion case for a big tent, saying, “We don’t tell people they can’t belong because they have a different opinion.” Both points carry weight, and the political environment supports them, since Matthew Yglesias noted in a New York Times guest essay on August 6 that national polling currently favors Democrats by six or seven points. But a majority won without settling the argument is a majority that must settle it in January, under deadline, with governing power at stake. In that same essay, Yglesias cited a June New York Times and Siena College poll of voters in Senate battleground states finding that 53 percent of likely voters think Democrats are too far to the left. Voters may not follow committee fights, yet they are entirely capable of noticing a party that cannot say who speaks for it.

None of this had to be the arrangement. The Democratic Party cannot name a leader because it was never built to have one, and the Republican Party carries the same vacancy at the top, hidden for the moment only because it holds the White House. Voters have noticed. Gallup reported in January 2026 that a record 45 percent of Americans do not identify with either party, which is close to half the country standing outside both.

The two rooms in Chicago and Austin will not stay a thousand miles apart, because in January they will be seated at the same table. The Americans being asked to send them there still have not been told which room will be doing the talking.

The time has come for a party that speaks for those Americans. The Centercratic Party was built for the moderate middle, with clear lines of authority so that someone is always accountable for what the party says and does, and without the ideological war that has the two old parties arguing with themselves instead of governing. No voter should have to wonder who is in charge of the party they just put in power.

Roger Rogoff is not a household name, and until this summer he had no reason to be. He is a Seattle lawyer who spent years as a King County Superior Court judge after Washington Governor Jay Inslee, a Democrat, appointed him to the bench, and Inslee later picked him again to build the state’s new office of independent investigations, which reviews police use of deadly force. On July 15 of this year, the federal judges of the Western District of Washington voted unanimously to make him the top federal prosecutor for the region covering Seattle and Tacoma. Roughly fifty-four minutes after he was sworn in, an email from the Trump administration informed him that he was fired.

The judges were not acting outside the law when they hired him. Federal law, at 28 U.S.C. § 546, allows the judges of a district to fill a United States attorney position when the seat has sat empty and the president has not sent a nominee through the Senate. The Seattle office qualified easily, because it had been without a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney since Nicholas Brown resigned in June 2023, and neither the Biden administration nor the Trump administration finished the job of replacing him.

What happened to Rogoff is not an isolated personnel dispute in one city. It is one more result of a two-year collapse in the way this country decides who is allowed to bring criminal charges in the name of the United States, and that collapse is now producing dismissed prosecutions, disqualified prosecutors, and offices run by people no elected body ever approved. Many voters may be under the impression that the November midterm elections will begin to repair this. They will not. Even if Democrats win control of the Senate by a seat or two in January, the same paralysis will continue under new management, because nothing about a change in the majority forces this president to nominate prosecutors the Senate will confirm, and nothing about it removes the workarounds his Justice Department has already put in place.

The record on how far this has gone is now written into court opinions. A federal judge in New Jersey ruled earlier this year that the administration had installed three separate prosecutors to run that state’s U.S. attorney’s office without Senate confirmation, and the judge warned that thousands of pending federal criminal cases could be put at risk as a result. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a decision issued Monday and reported by The New York Times, rejected a similar arrangement in Nevada, holding that the Attorney General cannot hand the full powers of a U.S. attorney to someone who never faced a Senate vote. That ruling followed a nearly identical decision by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals involving Alina Habba, a former personal attorney for President Trump who had been leading the New Jersey office beyond the term the law allowed.

Both parties in the Senate helped build this hole. Senate Republicans, under Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, have kept in place a century-old committee custom called the blue slip, which allows a nominee’s two home-state senators to stop a confirmation from moving simply by declining to return a signed form. Senate Democrats have used that custom to freeze the president’s picks in states such as New Jersey and Virginia, and they separately placed a blanket hold on the administration’s U.S. attorney nominees, which forces each one onto a slow floor process instead of the quick voice votes that used to clear routine appointments. Neither side is prepared to give up the leverage, and neither side has paid a political price for refusing.

The damage here is severe, and it is landing on ordinary criminal cases brought against ordinary defendants. There are 93 U.S. attorney’s offices across the country, and a Politico analysis found that nine to ten of them are being run indefinitely by a deputy who never received a Senate vote. That is roughly one in ten federal prosecution offices in the United States operating without a lawful leader, which is not a simple rounding error in a system that handles tens of thousands of cases a year. In several offices, the administration has sought to maintain its preferred prosecutor’s authority by redesignating that person as ‘first assistant’ after the statutory interim term expired. In New Mexico, defense attorneys have filed motions in nineteen separate criminal cases arguing that the prosecutor who charged their clients never held legal authority to do it. Prosecutions connected to former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were thrown out after courts found that the prosecutor overseeing them had blown past the 120-day limit Congress set for temporary appointments. When a defendant’s best argument is no longer about the evidence but about whether the person who signed the indictment was legally allowed to sign anything, the justice system has stopped doing its job.

Some readers will argue that a Democratic Senate would still be a real improvement, so let us walk through what that would actually look like. A Democratic majority would put a Democrat in the Judiciary Committee chair, and that chair decides which nominees get a hearing at all. Democrats could deny consent to procedural shortcuts and refuse to advance nominees they consider unqualified. Every one of those powers is a power to stop something, and none of them is the power to put a confirmed prosecutor into an empty office. Nothing in the president’s conduct over the past two years suggests he would answer a Democratic committee by sending up candidates capable of winning bipartisan support, and he would not have to, because the same 120-day statute would still be on the books, the same court-appointed fallback would still exist, and the same incentive to run these offices through temporary designations would still be sitting on his desk. What November can deliver is a new set of hands on the same locked door.

That is the realistic reading of where this is headed, and it is exactly the kind of problem the two established parties are structurally unable to solve, because each of them now benefits from the other’s obstruction. Neither party has offered a plan to fill these offices, because filling them would mean giving up the fight.

The confirmation process for U.S. attorneys exists so that the people who can indict a citizen answer to the elected representatives of that citizen, and not only to the administration that happens to hold the executive branch. The repair cannot be a change in who wins the obstruction contest. It has to be a Senate that holds actual votes on actual nominees, and a president who sends up prosecutors capable of surviving those votes.

Roger Rogoff is still waiting for a federal judge to decide whether he can walk back into an office he held for less than an hour, and the Supreme Court is expected to decide whether the practice that removed him can continue at all. Neither of those outcomes depends on which party controls the Senate next year, and that is the measure of how far this has slipped.

A country can survive politicians who dislike each other. It cannot survive very long as a nation of laws if the people who enforce those laws hold their offices at the pleasure of a workaround, and if the citizens they charge cannot be sure the charges were ever lawfully brought.

The deeper failure, then, is not simply a vacancy statute or a Senate custom. It is a political culture that increasingly treats every procedural tool as legitimate so long as it disadvantages the other side.

None of this had to happen. Our two parties have operated from the beginning without ever defining a clear set of values to guide how they behave, how they govern, and how they protect our republic. The Centercratic Party was built the other way around, on nine principles that do not move with the election calendar. The first of them requires governing through compromise rather than domination, rejecting the extreme tactics pushed by special interests, and defending the Constitution for every American rather than only for the ones who voted for the party in power. Had either existing party held itself to that standard, Seattle would have a confirmed federal prosecutor today, and Roger Rogoff would be a name that nobody ever had reason to learn.

Within thirteen days this summer, two of the most senior figures in the Democratic Party stood before separate national audiences and called for rebuilding the structure of our democratic government. Former Vice President Kamala Harris said the country needs to revisit expanding the Supreme Court to 13 justices, doing away with the Electoral College, and granting statehood to Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said that dramatic Supreme Court reform is necessary, and that a variety of options are on the table that he is not willing to rule out. Both of these politicians know exactly how our system of government works, and neither one told the audience that the changes they proposed cannot be delivered. Instead, they served up crowd-pleasing proposals that garnered rounds of applause. This is the latest political sales gimmick, and it delivers nothing to the country except more anger and division.

Senior Democratic leaders are selling changes to our system of government that would have to clear vote counts in Congress that are insurmountable, and possible constitutional amendments that are almost impossible to pull off. Meanwhile, the problems Americans actually expect Washington to solve remain largely untouched: immigration, the cost of education, Social Security’s solvency, and a national debt that grows every hour.

Let’s take each proposal one at a time. Harris made her remarks at the National Urban League conference in Nashville on July 31, and Jeffries made his remarks at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Atlanta on August 13, where The Wall Street Journal reported his call for dramatic reform. Neither leader walked the audience through what any one of these changes would actually require of Congress.

The first proposal was expanding the Supreme Court to 13 justices. That change does not require touching the Constitution, because as The Wall Street Journal noted, the number of justices is not fixed in the document. Congress could do it with an ordinary law, which means a bill that passes the House, passes the Senate, and is signed by the president. The Senate is where such a bill would die. The Wall Street Journal reported that even if Democrats win back both chambers this fall, a court bill would still need 60 votes in the 100-member Senate unless Democrats first eliminate the filibuster, which is the Senate rule that lets a minority block a bill by preventing a final vote. The Journal also reported that Jeffries supports major changes to those Senate rules, and that position amounts to an admission that the rules as they stand block the reform he is calling for. Even if a bill somehow cleared both chambers, President Trump could veto it, and he holds that power until his term ends in January 2029.

The last time Congress changed the size of the Supreme Court was 1869, when a law signed by President Grant set it at nine members. It has stayed at nine ever since. During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed expanding the court to as many as 15 justices after the justices struck down parts of his New Deal, and The Washington Post reported that the plan drew pushback from Republicans as well as many of his fellow Democrats. Roosevelt held majorities far larger than any Democratic leader will hold next year, yet he still could not do it, because his own party understood that a door built to swing one way swings back.

The public is not clamoring for this, and scholars warn it would make matters worse. A May survey by Marquette Law School found Americans split evenly on expanding the court, 50 percent in favor and 50 percent opposed. Term limits are usually presented as the moderate option in this debate. They are not. The bill Senate Democrats reintroduced in July would hold justices to 18 years and then fill the resulting vacancies on a regular two-year schedule. Written that way, every presidential term would come with a guaranteed number of Supreme Court appointments, which would turn every presidential election into an open contest for specific seats on the bench. Daniel Epps of Washington University and Ganesh Sitaraman of Vanderbilt Law School argued in a 2019 paper against both term limits and expansion of the court, because each one risks pulling the institution further into partisan politics. Epps told The Washington Post that this is the first court whose ideology maps directly onto partisan affiliation. Adding four justices chosen by a single party would not repair that problem. It would make it permanent.

The senators sponsoring recent 18-year term-limit court bills do not dispute the odds. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who introduced the term limits bill, told The Washington Post that “even in a Congress like this one, where these bills have no chance of passage, it’s really important to file them and to stand by them, because they reassure people that there is in fact a mechanism by which the court could be restored to some degree of better order.” Consider what he just admitted. A United States senator explained that his own legislation exists to make people feel better, not to become law. This is not governance. This is pure politics.

The second proposal was revisiting the Electoral College, which in practice means eliminating the system this country uses to elect a president. That one is far harder than adding justices. The way we choose a president is written into the Constitution, so changing it requires a constitutional amendment. An amendment needs two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and then ratification by 38 of the 50 states. Nothing approaching two-thirds support exists in either chamber today, and the smaller states that gain influence from the current arrangement have no reason to surrender that advantage. Asking three-quarters of the states to surrender their own influence over who becomes president is not a governing strategy. It is a dream that will never come true.

The third proposal was statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, and Harris added the condition that it should happen only if the residents of those places want it. Statehood takes an act of Congress and nothing more, which puts it on the same road as court expansion. Any statehood bill would have to survive that same 60-vote threshold in the Senate, and then it would need a presidential signature that is not coming from this White House.

Democrats may well win the House in November. But this new majority arriving in January is showing no signs of partnering with Republicans to fix the immigration system, to shore up a Social Security retirement fund that the program’s own trustees now project will run short in late 2032, or to slow a national debt that keeps climbing.

We do not have to guess what they will do instead, because both parties have already announced it. Reuters reported this month that House Democrats are building an investigative campaign of subpoenas, compelled testimony and contempt proceedings, and that impeachment is being held in reserve rather than taken off the table. A senior Democratic aide told Reuters, “We’re not going into this to impeach. No one wants a failed vote on day one.” Republicans are preparing the other half of the show. Axios reported that they will hold their first ever midterm convention in Dallas next month, built around the argument that the Democratic Party has been captured by its activist left, and that they have collected video of left-wing Democrats to run throughout the event. One person involved described the supply of material to Axios by saying, “Our video trove is endless.” Reuters counted the president using the word communism 81 times in a single two-week stretch this summer.

This country cannot go on like this for another two years. The cycle of attack and counterattack is wearing away the fabric of the nation.

There is another way to govern. The sixth principle of the Centercratic Party asks leaders to build policies that can earn broad and lasting support. That is not some nostalgic fantasy. America has done it before. The Clean Air Act Amendments passed the Senate 89 to 10 in 1990. The Social Security rescue of 1983 passed 58 to 14. Both endure because neither belonged exclusively to one party. The country owned them.

Sadly, this country will continue to rot for another two years while the parties bicker endlessly over who gets to run it.

Gallup reported in January that a record 45 percent of Americans now identify with neither party, while 27 percent claim the Democrats and 27 percent claim the Republicans. When will the largest group in American politics finally rise up and put a stop to this nonsense?

An Important Message from Paul Chapman, Executive Director of the Centercratic Party

What you are about to read is not a political argument. It is a record of events unfolding right now, in real time, across the United States. The redistricting battles of 2026 are not a routine chapter in American political history. They are a live demonstration of exactly why the Centercratic Party was formed and why the moment to rebuild the political center is not coming. It is here.

The Centercratic Party was built on a straightforward conviction: that 45 percent of Americans have been left without a political home, that both major parties are structurally incapable of returning to the center, and that principled, governance-focused leadership is the only path forward for this country. The events of recent weeks have made that case more powerfully than anything we could have written ourselves.

I share this article not to alarm you, but to invite you to see what we see: a country that deserves better, and a party that is ready to deliver it.

Paul J Chapman

When the Centercratic Party recently launched, the core argument was straightforward and deliberately provocative: the two political parties that Americans had known for generations were gone. Not struggling. Not underperforming. Gone! Replaced by two ideological machines locked at the fringes, structurally incapable of returning to the center, and abandoning the 45 percent of Americans who had no home in either one.

That argument was not a political opinion. It was a diagnosis built on history, data, and a clear-eyed look at how both parties had been transformed over fifty years by a flood of extreme money, the collapse of local organizing, the rise of outrage-driven media, and a gerrymandering system that punished any politician who dared to compromise. The old donkey and the old elephant had morphed into different beasts entirely. And the center of American politics, the place where governance actually happens, where deals get made, where the country moves forward, had been left completely empty.

Some people heard that argument and nodded. Many were skeptical. A few said it was too harsh.

And then came the spring of 2026.

What Is Happening Right Now Is Not a Surprise. It Is Confirmation.

Everything the Centercratic Party warned about is now playing out, in real time, on the front pages of every major newspaper in the country. The redistricting battles of the past several months are not a new chapter in American politics. They are the proof, visible, undeniable, and deeply troubling, that the diagnosis was right.

Picture two armies locked in World War I-style trench warfare. Both sides dug in deep. Both sides convinced they are fighting for something righteous. Both sides willing to sacrifice democratic principles, long-held values, and the very voters they were elected to represent. All in the name of gaining a few inches of political ground. That is what Americans are watching unfold right now. Not governance. Not leadership. A map war, waged at the expense of democracy itself.

President Trump pressured Republican legislatures across the South (Texas, North Carolina, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, and Alabama) to redraw congressional maps in the middle of a decade, an extraordinary departure from the post-census process that has governed redistricting for generations. The White House did not send a policy memo. It placed direct phone calls to state senators, lieutenant governors, and even gubernatorial candidates, applying personal pressure to override the reservations of elected officials in their own party. When South Carolina’s Republican governor and Sen. Lindsey Graham expressed caution, the White House went around them.

Democrats, who spent a decade presenting independent redistricting commissions as the gold standard of democratic integrity, walked away from that principle the moment it became politically inconvenient. California’s governor replaced his state’s independent commission with a legislative gerrymander. Virginia Democrats did the same. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries backed redistricting efforts in state after state. A principle they had championed for years lasted only as long as it was useful.

Then the Virginia Supreme Court struck that Democratic map down on May 9, 2026. Tom Perriello, a candidate who had spent months building a fully operational campaign, woke up Friday morning in a district Donald Trump had won by twelve points. Dan Helmer had received a delivery of 1,000 freshly printed yard signs on Thursday evening. By Friday morning, the court had ruled and there was no district left for him to run in.

But the court ruling did not stop either party from reaching for more. Within 24 hours of the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries convened a private call with Virginia’s Democratic congressional delegation to discuss how to undo it. The most audacious idea on that call — discussed seriously among sitting members of Congress — was a proposal to lower the mandatory retirement age for Virginia Supreme Court justices from 75 to 54, forcing every current justice off the bench and replacing them with Democratic appointees, all for the purpose of reinstating a gerrymandered map. Mr. Jeffries had already declared that Democrats would employ “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” Even former Democratic Congressman James Moran called the court-packing idea “just a bridge too far.” The independence of the judiciary, it turned out, was only worth defending when the judges were ruling the right way.

The Supreme Court added its own chapter. On April 29, 2026, the court issued a ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that weakened the Voting Rights Act, making it significantly harder for minority voters to challenge redistricting maps that diminish their representation. The ruling may shift as many as nine seats in Southern states and opens the door for maps that leave millions of Americans without a realistic shot at electing a representative of their own choosing.

Even Republicans said out loud what the Centercratic Party has been saying for months. Representative Mike Lawler of New York called the entire redistricting battle “mutually assured destruction, and it is completely the antithesis of representative democracy.” Former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said of the Republican redistricting push: it was “bad for the nation.” These are voices from inside the trench, looking around and recognizing the damage being done.

Two Parties in the Trenches. One Country Left Behind.

The redistricting war is not happening in a vacuum. It is happening while gas prices are squeezing working families. It is happening while a paper mill sits closed at the edge of a dying Ohio town and its workers wonder what Washington has to do with their lives. It is happening while college-educated Iowans leave their home state by the thousands and their leaders in the statehouse spend their energy on partisan power struggles.

In Chillicothe, Ohio, a steelworker named Jerry Gray who voted for Trump in 2024 shrugged when asked how he planned to vote this fall. He was not energized by either party’s map strategy. He was not inspired by the redistricting fight in Virginia or the Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana. He liked his former senator, Sherrod Brown, because Brown had once helped his union with contract negotiations. “Let’s see what happens with the war,” he said, and left it at that.

That shrug is the sound of 45 percent of America.

And in Iowa, a state Trump carried by more than 13 points in 2024 with Republicans in the governor’s office for fifteen straight years, a candidate running on the message “Not redder or bluer, but better and truer” has turned the governor’s race into a tossup. More than 1,500 registered Republicans and more than 4,000 voters with no party affiliation have donated to his campaign. He calls the current political system what it is, “a broken two-choice system,” and voters in one of the reddest states in the country are responding.

That is not a coincidence. That is the center calling out. It has been calling out for a long time. And until now, there was nowhere for it to go.

The Foundation Has Always Been Clear

The Centercratic Party was not formed as a reaction to any single news cycle. It was formed because the evidence was overwhelming and the moment was real in a way it had never been before.

The two parties cannot go back to the center. That bears repeating, because it is the most important political truth of our time. It is not that they lack the will. It is that they are structurally trapped. Going back would require them to walk away from the extreme donors who keep the lights on, to tell their most passionate activists that the era of ideological purity is over, and to make their operations transparent when opacity is exactly what protects those in charge. Both parties depend on extremism for their survival. The trap has no door.

The result: a 93 percent collapse in the ability of Congress to pass laws compared to the 1950s. Congressional approval at an all-time low. Sixty percent who say a third party is needed. Forty-five percent who identify as independent, a number larger than those who identify with either major party.

These are not protest numbers. They are not temporary frustration. They are the structural reality of a democratic system that has lost its center. The two parties that created that problem are structurally incapable of solving it.

That is why the Centercratic Party was formed. Not to argue with either party. Not to split the difference between them. To fill the vacuum they left behind, with governance built on permanent principles, with leadership that serves people rather than donors, and with a commitment to the simple and powerful idea that 45 percent of the American electorate deserves a home.

The Principles Are Not Negotiable. That Is the Point.

Ask yourself a simple question: what democratic principles guide the Democratic Party? What democratic principles guide the Republican Party?

Write them down if you can find them, but I will save you the time because neither party has any. Democrats had spent years holding up independent redistricting commissions as the ethical standard for fair elections. The moment Republicans turned that standard against them, they walked away without a second thought. Republicans had long declared their opposition to redrawing maps outside the post-census cycle. The moment the White House placed a phone call, that opposition evaporated. No principles. No anchor. No line that either party would not cross. That is not a failure of leadership. When there are no principles, there is nothing to betray.

Why wouldn’t the vast majority of Americans — Democrat, Republican, and independent alike — be appalled by what both parties are doing to our democracy?

When just one person in the White House can drop a single pebble into the water of our democracy and send waves crashing through state legislatures, courtrooms, and congressional districts across the entire country, and not one voice in either party stands firm on clearly established democratic principles, our American Republic is not simply struggling — it is at a point of dissolution. The system that generations of Americans built, defended, and died for is being hollowed out from the inside. And the two parties entrusted to protect it are too busy fighting each other to notice what they are destroying.

The Centercratic Party’s nine guiding principles are not campaign promises. Those principles are: safeguarding our democratic system, limiting terms, protecting election integrity, applying one law for all, debating with facts and dignity, seeking unity through broad support, governing with balance, defending American freedom, and exemplifying global leadership. They are the operating rules of the organization. They do not get rewritten when the political weather changes. They do not get shelved when holding them is inconvenient. That distinction is not a small thing. It is everything.

A party without principles is not a party. It is a marketing operation designed to look like a party when needed. The redistricting war of 2026 has made that clearer than any political speech or article ever could.

America Has Always Built What It Needed

This country has never waited for broken institutions to repair themselves. When the institutions that were supposed to serve the people stopped doing so, Americans built new ones. That is the through-line of American political history, from the founding forward.

Abraham Lincoln did not fix the parties that had failed the nation before him. He helped build a new one. Not out of ambition, but out of necessity. The moment demanded it. The existing institutions were incapable of rising to it.

This is one of those moments.

The two parties in the trenches are not going to stop fighting over maps and start governing. The forces that drove them to the extremes are not going away: the donor money, the partisan media, the gerrymandered safe seats, the purity-testing primaries. The trap they are in has no door.

But the 45 percent of Americans who have been left without a political home are not going away either. We are done watching. We are done waiting. We are building something genuinely different, and we are building it now.

The Centercratic Party is that something. It was built for this era, with the seriousness and discipline and principled foundation that this moment demands. The confirmation of its founding argument is unfolding on the front pages right now, week by week, ruling by ruling, map by map.

The center did not leave American politics. The parties left the center. And the time to rebuild it, with real leadership, real principles, and real commitment to the people who have been waiting, is now.