Combined–Control of the U.S. House of Representatives – Control of the U.S. Senate. by ChrisnHouston. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

As I write this column, nearly two weeks after the 2026 midterm elections, we still don’t know the full results. The US Senate race in Alaska may not be known for certain until November 18, and several other close races around the country remain unresolved, possibly coming down to recounts and/or litigation.

We DO know that the Democratic, rather than Republican, party will hold majorities in the US Senate and US House of Representatives.

The consequences: The Speaker of the House, the “leadership” of the House and Senate, and the chairs of various committees, will be Democrats.

It’s easy to assume — and most people seem to — that these changes will translate to big moves on government policy.  But previous shifts of the type, such as the Democrats’ seizure of dual majorities in 2006, tell a different story.

Aside from some soaring rhetoric and likely quite a bit of partisan retribution in the form of hearings, “lawfare,” and maybe impeachments, we’re probably going to see business as usual from the US government.

There are a couple of mechanistic reasons for that, and one bigger reason. Let’s look at the trivial/mechanistic side first:

First, while the Democrats will hold majorities in both houses, those majorities will be fairly small. They won’t have the 290 House votes to override a presidential veto, nor will they have the 60 Senate votes to “end filibusters” (that is, end debate on, and go to majority vote on, bills) or the 67 votes to override vetoes or convict impeached officials.

Second, the above numbers reflect “party line” voting, and on several issues significant numbers of Democrats agree with Republicans. We saw that in the November 10 vote to table the impeachment of US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, when 11 Democrats didn’t show up to vote. Some had arranged to be out of town, others claimed they were “stuck in traffic,” but the obvious real reason was that their foreign policy views aligned more with the Trump administration’s than with the position of their own party’s anti-war-crimes wing. They didn’t have the courage to vote “no,” but they did have incentives to not vote at all.

Third, a big portion of federal spending is “non-discretionary.” It’s on rails. It happens unless Congress specifically acts to change it. Most politicians of both parties incline toward “leaving well enough alone” rather than risking political backlash even if it’s not actually “well enough” (that’s why Social Security continues to accelerate toward insolvency).

All of those are important factors in thwarting real change, but the three combined aren’t as important as the fourth reason, which is:

Politics is about power. Both parties are united in their resolve to rule the rest of us, and most politicians are unwilling to rein in executive power, or any other government power. Even if they complain about specific exercises of that power, they’ll never act to reduce the power itself.

To put it a different way, every member of Congress sees a future president in the bathroom mirror every morning and has no intention of weakening that future presidency. It’s not the particular actions they care about, it’s the availability of the same imperial prerogatives when and if “their turn” arrives.

We’re going to hear lots of speeches, most of which will decry “Republican obstructionism.”

We may see a few “grand bargains” between the parties, but only bargains that make government more powerful and you less free.

We won’t see real change, because politics is a ranch. The politicians are the ranchers. We’re the livestock. That’s the relationship, and it remains the same whether the ranchers wear red cowboy hats or blue overalls.

Either party might scatter some extra feed for the chickens or muck out the horses’ stalls, but neither will, in even the slightest way, rein in its own power to shear, milk, ride, or slaughter us at will.

I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but we didn’t — and can’t — vote our way out of that system. Even collapse or revolution historically just result in new ranch management rather than a new birth of freedom.

The first step, as recovering alcoholics often say, is admitting you have a problem. The second step … well, that’s more complicated, isn’t it?

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“American public schools are in the middle of a crisis,” the New York Times‘s Natalie Kitroeff says in the November 11 episode of Times podcast The Daily. “There aren’t enough students to fill their classrooms. In some cities, enrollments have been shrinking so dramatically that officials say they have no choice but to close schools en masse.”

Interviewing Times education reporter Sarah Mervosh, who co-authored an article on the topic (also describing the situation as a “crisis”) in May, Kitroeff asks Mervosh to to “help us understand the scope of …. the enrollment problem in public schools today and why this problem matters or should matter to us.”

Mervosh offers several answers:

First, funding is tied to student numbers, and reductions don’t scale well to desired class sizes and teacher numbers, or to maintaining “magnet” and “specialty” schools as student numbers decline.

Second, schools tend toward segregation by race and class (despite decades of supposed remedies for such segregation), and parents get upset when there are fewer options that cater to their preferred  segregation schemes.

Third (but obviously tied to the aforementioned segregation), the obvious response to fewer students is fewer schools, and “closing schools is one of the most unpopular things you can do in education.”

When someone asserts a “crisis,” the natural interpretation goes with the negative definition per WordNet: “an unstable situation of extreme danger or difficulty.”

That negative definition is fairly modern. The previously prevailing definition was more along the lines of “a crucial stage or turning point in the course of something.”

Yes, declining student enrollment in government schools is a “crisis” in the second sense … but it need not be one in the first.

Why is that enrollment decreasing?

The biggest factor at this point is that Americans are simply having fewer kids than we used to, a trend that seems likely to continue.

A second factor, not as large but growing, is that more and more parents are choosing private education and homeschooling over the government version.

The number of POTENTIAL government students has been decreasing since 2007, when birth rates began falling. That was the beginning of the turning point, the “crisis.” Private education and homeschooling are increasingly reducing the number of ACTUAL government students as well.

Will some people experience negative effects from this “crisis?” Yes.

Parents may have to make some difficult choices about where, how, and from whom their kids will receive education.

Fewer potential teachers and administrators will have jobs waiting for them if they choose to major in education in college.

These are the kinds of problems that markets are very good at dealing with. Government monopolies, not so much. We should push our politicians to move toward separation of school and state and letting the market do its thing, instead of just closing/consolidating specific facilities, reducing hiring quotas, and trying to keep the government education gravy train rolling.

But even within the context of “public” schools, Kitroeff and Mervosh seem to miss the gigantic silver linings in this ongoing student enrollment decline.

Fewer students and fewer facilities mean lower costs.

Dilapidated schools can be closed, sold, and put to productive use by the private sector.

Instead of hiring and retaining MORE teachers, government school systems can get selective and insist on BETTER teachers.

Taxpayers can keep more of their money, using that money to improve both the educations and the general living conditions of their children.

Just kidding on that last one. If politicians spend less of your money on schools, they’ll just spend more of your money on other, probably equally dysfunctional, activities.

But it’s a start.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On July 14, by a vote of 308 to 117, the US House of Representatives passed the “Sunshine Protection Act,” which would end our twice-yearly ritual of “springing forward” and “falling back” by making “Daylight Saving Time” the permanent national standard for timekeeping.

Getting that done seems to be one of president Donald Trump’s priorities — one of his few such priorities with which I wholly agree. Unfortunately, the US Senate recessed before voting on the law and it’s unclear whether they’ll get around to it before January and the seating of a new class of Senators.

Various polls show the public broadly in support of ending the “spring forward / fall back” nonsense, but not necessarily in agreement on whether the standard should be “Standard Time” or “Daylight Saving Time.” I’ve seen good arguments from both sides. My own position is: Pick one and make it happen.

For whatever reason, such measures always seem to bog down in Congress. Unable to decide which direction to go in, they always end up punting and putting us through another year of those annoying clock changes.

There’s a third way for Congress to go about exercising its Article 1, Section 8 power to “fix the standard of weights and measures” that’s simple and sensible.

Of course, Congress hates simple and sensible things, but my proposal comes with a sweetener: It would let them permanently abdicate part of the aforementioned power in a way that no longer subjects them to pressure or blame in the matter.

The first part of the proposal is to make “Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)” the national standard.

UTC is, per Wikipedia, “a weighted average of hundreds of atomic clocks worldwide” that is “currently within about one second of mean solar time at 0° longitude, the currently used prime meridian, and is not adjusted for daylight saving time.”

To put it a different way:  Under UTC, absent any locally imposed “offsets,”  clocks show the same times in Los Angeles, London, Lisbon, and Lviv.

At first, it might seem kind of weird that your 9am shift in New York now starts at 2pm (better yet, just plain 1400), even thought it’s the same “time of day.”

But you’d get used to it, and it would actually make scheduling phone calls, Zoom meetings, etc. with participants currently living across multiple “time zones” much easier. Three people in Boston, Berlin, and  Beijing wouldn’t have to “convert time” to know when to show up for a conference.

The second part is to make the change a constitutional amendment, proposed by 2/3 of both houses of Congress and ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures. Proposed text:

“Effective as of midnight on January 1, [of the year after ratification], the government of the United States shall utilize Coordinated Universal Time in all official operations and communications, without application of daylight saving or other offsets. The states may, effective as of midnight on January 1, [of the year after ratification] adopt such timekeeping standards as their legislatures or people may direct.”

Upon ratification, Congress would be off the hook. The matter of timekeeping schemes would no longer be their problem to solve. I strongly suspect that most states would similarly move to UTC, but that’s up to them.

My  proposal comes with a second sweetener: “National security.” Military commanders in one “time zone” would no longer have to coordinate time differentials with  commanders in other zones when planning operations. The “time” at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri would be the same “time” as at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait and at Naval Facility Okinawa.

My personal position remains the same: Pick a single, not semi-annual, timekeeping scheme and implement it instead of just arguing about it.

The current scheme, especially the “spring forward” part, costs us money (more than half a billion dollars in lost productivity) and lives (via spikes in car accidents, workplace injuries, cardiac events, and suicides).

We can, and should, do better. It’s time to.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY