Bill McMorris

The Democratic establishment has never looked more vulnerable to progressive upheaval; Biden's supposed leadership bridge to a new generation leads nowhere. "Moderate" darling transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg has seen his slim national prospects dwindle with every near-miss in the air and toxic train derailment on the ground. Vice President Kamala Harris has been about as visible as Biden was on the 2020 campaign trail — and a geriatric Capitol Hill leadership class appears on its last legs. The scene is set for the party’s progressives to strike. And yet there is little relief in sight for the party’s left wing as its own geriatric champion rides off into the sunset.

The following is an excerpt from Yale University law professor Elizabeth Friedkin’s remarks to the 2026 International Federation of United Conscious Uncoupling Professionals. When then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene first proposed the dissolution of the United States of America in 2023, many feared she was threatening a second Civil War, including most of us in this room. Over the past two years, however, we have witnessed a benign break-up that is now a beacon to dissatisfied land conglomerates the world over. I was skeptical when I was chosen to serve as arbitrator, but I will be the first to admit that I underestimated the shrewdness of Ms. Taylor Greene.

Joe Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer once berated the commander-in-chief at his Wilmington home. Biden couldn’t get a word in edgewise without the legal giant interrupting. Aides recall the no-nonsense law professor muttering, “Not very smart, Joe,” and “I don’t know why you’d say that,” and “That’s dumb.” Bauer was playing Trump in mock debates at the time. Little did he know that he was standing in the middle of a crime scene, one he and his team of attorneys would be revisiting to quell a scandal of the president’s own making. The discovery of classified material at Biden’s various residences and offices makes for an open-and-shut case, according to former federal prosecutor Joe Moreno.

In 1958, the federal government surveyed the vast plains of the United States for the site that would launch the future of humanity and settled on... Greenbelt, Maryland, which had the advantage of a quick commute from the capital. On weekdays 7,000 people travel to NASA’s Goddard Space Center to work on those telescopes that go viral every few months with their high-definition photos of space. They were off for Labor Day weekend, so only a couple of hundred people were on hand to see the dawn of a political revolution.

You couldn’t miss him as you strolled down K Street. He wore a fedora and boxy suits, was not afraid to imbibe as he worked, and paced the capital’s most infamous stretch chain-smoking cigarettes. He arrived in Washington in the Nineties as a traveling salesman and would have kept right on traveling were it not for that checkout girl. For three decades, he put the road behind him and went to work erasing any trace of the street from the brogues, Oxfords and, in the final decade of his life, the slip-on monks and bit loafers ubiquitous among the graceless lobbyists of the twenty-first century. K Street may have become too busy to tie shoelaces, but its denizens were never too busy for a happy-hour stop with the self-proclaimed “Godfather of Shine.

I was in a South Carolina dive bar, the type recent graduates cheekily show off to the parents who subsidized their six-figure educations. I stepped into a courtyard — for even the states tobacco built have banned indoor smoking — and was greeted by thick plumes of poisoned air. Those shades came from manicured hands holding glorified USB memory sticks, not the fingers stained yellow by 70-millimeter Marlboros. I gathered with the only people holding the latter — a bar manager and pair of fathers no doubt looking to calm the nerves after realizing this is what they took out a second mortgage to pay for.

I warned every Republican about the moral hazard that Donald Trump posed to America from the moment he rode down that golden escalator. In 2008, following generations of discrimination, American voters made history by electing a cigarette smoker to the Oval Office. Why erase all that progress by replacing him with a tobacco-free teetotaler? The American people did not listen, and so, on December 20, the federal government raised the smoking age from the mindless 18 to the criminal 21.Like all great betrayals, this one was bipartisan. Every horrible cause needs its useful idiots, so Trump turned to tobacco states for political cover. Sen.