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Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger delivers the Democratic response to U.S. President Donald Trump's State of the Union address on February 24, 2026 in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Getty Images, Mike Kropf
Three Questions Linger After State of the Union Speech
Mar 11, 2026
Anyone tuning into the State of the Union expecting responsible governance was sorely disappointed. What they got instead was pure Trumpian spectacle.
All the familiar elements were there: extended applause lines, culture-war provocation, even self-congratulation, praising the U.S. hockey team and folding its victory into a broader narrative of national resurgence. The whole thing was show business, crafted for reaction rather than reflection, for clips rather than consensus.
It was a relief when Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger delivered the Democratic response and shifted the conversation from overheated rhetoric to three simple questions.
She asked: Is the president working to make life more affordable for you and your family? Is the president working to keep Americans safe, both at home and abroad? Is the president working for you?
The administration can try to spin them, but lived experience tells a different story. The answers are not in the chamber but in daily life: at the grocery store, at the gas pump, on a credit card statement, in the safety of our communities, and at the kitchen table.
Affordability
Start with affordability.
Inflation has cooled from its post-pandemic highs, and the White House is quick to note it. Unemployment remains low and, on paper, the indicators look stable.
But affordability is not a chart; it is a daily reality that asks whether wages keep pace with rent and insurance premiums, whether retirement savings feel secure, and whether families believe next year will bring more stability than the last.
Confidence, however, is eroding. Consumer sentiment has fallen for four consecutive months, reaching its lowest level since 2020. Americans’ outlook on income, business conditions, and jobs has dropped to a 12-year low, and credit card delinquencies more than 90 days past due have climbed to a 13-year high.
For many middle-class families, the markers of the American Dream feel increasingly distant. Mortgage rates have doubled from pandemic lows, pushing first-time homeownership out of reach, while rents have outpaced wages in many cities. Childcare rivals college tuition in some states. Health insurance premiums and deductibles keep rising. Student loan payments have resumed, tightening already strained budgets.
The result is persistent anxiety as families delay buying homes, young couples postpone having children, and retirement contributions shrink to cover short-term expenses. While certain parts of the economy may be growing, family confidence is not.
These are not partisan numbers. They are economic stress signals that raise a harder question: Is the administration calming uncertainty, or amplifying it?
Security
The second question follows: Are we safe?
At the State of the Union, the language of safety was everywhere: border security, military strength, law and order. The president cited deportations, renewed border barriers, and rebuilding the armed forces as proof that America was regaining control. The imagery was calculated; strength projected from the podium was meant to reassure a jittery nation. Yet reassuring words carry little weight when daily life tells another story. Security, like affordability, rests not on rhetoric but on durable governance.
By the end of the week, the administration launched military strikes against Iran, a war of choice that risks destabilizing the Middle East and drawing the United States into another prolonged conflict. The question is not whether strength should ever be used, but whether its use makes Americans safer or merely signals resolve.
True security in a constitutional republic is measured not by how quickly a president acts alone, but by whether policy withstands scrutiny, commands legislative backing, and strengthens institutions rather than bypassing them.
In recent months, the administration has leaned heavily on executive orders and emergency authorities to reshape immigration enforcement and national security posture. Executive action is swift but also reversible; what one president builds by decree, the next can erase with a signature. That cycle may project decisiveness, but it does not build stability.
Alliances require consistency. Deterrence requires credibility. Border policy requires coordination with Congress, courts, and states. When governance turns unilateral, security becomes personality-driven rather than system-driven.
Personality is not a strategy.
Is the President Working for You?
The third question cuts deeper: Is the president working for you?
In a constitutional system, that question is answered not by rally size or executive speed, but by whether power flows through institutions designed to represent the public. Congress controls the purse and should be consulted before taking the country to war. Courts review executive action. Agencies implement laws shaped through deliberation and compromise. When those structures function, citizens may disagree with outcomes yet still recognize the process as legitimate.
When they weaken, the shift is subtle but significant. Budgets are deferred through continuing resolutions. Policy moves through executive orders rather than legislation. Loyalty begins to outweigh expertise in the civil service. The visible story is decisive leadership; the deeper reality is institutional erosion.
A president working for the public strengthens the mechanisms that translate disagreement into policy and works through them, even when it is slower and less dramatic.
The State of the Union was performative, the applause loud and partisan, the imagery vivid, but the real test is quieter: whether families feel more secure, whether the nation is safer in ways that endure, and whether the institutions that bind us are stronger, not thinner. When the chamber empties, the lights dim, and the clips circulate, the serious questions remain.
Robert Cropf is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Louis University.
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Oksana Masters of Team United States celebrates after winning gold in the Para Cross Country Skiing Sprint Sitting Final on day four of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Paralympic Games at Tesero Cross-Country Skiing Stadium on March 10, 2026 in Val di Fiemme, Italy.
Getty Images, Buda Mendes
The Paralympics Challenge Everything We Think We Know About Sports
Mar 11, 2026
If you’re a sports fan, you likely watched coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina. But will you watch the Paralympics when approximately 665 athletes are expected in Italy to compete in the Para sports of alpine skiing, biathlon, cross-country skiing, ice hockey, snowboarding, and wheelchair curling?
The Paralympics, so-called because they are “parallel” to the Olympics, stand alone as the globe’s premier sporting event for elite athletes with disabilities. According to the International Paralympic Committee, 4,400 disabled athletes competed in the 2024 Paris Summer Games in track and field, swimming, and twenty other sports.
Worldwide, viewers consumed 763.3 million hours of dedicated live coverage during the 2024 Paralympics, an increase of 83 percent from the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics. Yet audience viewership still far underperforms when compared to the Olympics.
As a scholar who teaches about and studies Paralympic sport, and who makes films highlighting Paralympic athleticism, I know why: I’ve seen how often Para-sport can be mistakenly viewed as an inspirational spectacle of athletes “overcoming” disabilities, displaying courage and resilience, but ultimately performing at a lower level than able-bodied athletes.
The reality is that the Paralympics are inspirational, but for different reasons. It’s elite sport at its most essential: focused athleticism, hard-core competitiveness, and record-breaking performances. And to watch it closely is to encounter some of the most complex questions sport has to offer—about fairness, performance, technology, and the body itself. For these reasons, the Paralympics offer a spectator experience that’s less about overcoming and more about mastery with diverse bodies.
For one, the Paralympics make us re-think who counts as an athlete. At the Paralympic Games, athletes with disabilities are missing limbs, they sometimes lack eyesight, and may use assistive devices such as wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs. Yet the athletes in our films view their disabilities as the fact that made possible their world-class Paralympic performances, rather than as impaired bodies defined by the able-bodied world.
Showcasing these athletes’ elite performances also raises important questions about how we define “excellence” in sports. In the Winter Paralympics, you can see double amputee skiers race at speeds up to 80 miles per hour on the same courses used by Olympic skiers. Meanwhile, sitting biathlon athletes will pole their way through courses ranging from 4.5 to 7.5 miles. Lower extremity amputees incorporate a variety of strategies to maintain and manage balance, all while attending to the intensive muscular demands of the solely upper body activity.
These unique bodies demonstrate unique athletic risks and skill demands—reason alone to watch the Paralympics. Excellence in Para-sport is not about overcoming impairment but about maximizing skill execution within the constraints and possibilities of a specific embodied configuration.
At the Paralympics, the question of fair competition pushes the boundaries of how we think about the fundaments of competition. Each Paralympic athlete is assessed by a team of experts who determine the level of function, ensuring that athletes compete against those with similar physical capacity but potentially different disabilities. Decisions about who competes against whom determine medals, funding, and careers. The result is a sporting environment in which fairness is not a questionable assumption but an ongoing negotiation, providing Paralympic audiences with a transparent view of the risks, challenges, and thrills of elite sport.
Yet, the assistive devices that some Paralympians require are sometimes scrutinized as “cheating” or unfair, as 2024 Paralympic high jump gold medalist Ezra Frech has experienced. But carbon-fiber blades, customized racing chairs, and auditory balls are not considered cheating in the Paralympics; they are part of the sport, just as specialized swimsuits, speed skates, and ski jumping suits are elsewhere.
And that’s part of what makes the Paralympics so valuable. It makes bodily differences visible by forcing us to ask difficult questions: What counts as an advantage? Where do we draw the line between technology and talent?
What goes without question is that the Paralympics offer viewers a powerful and expanded view of bodily possibilities and bodies of many configurations as athletes aim for the beautiful and superhuman performances that attract us to watch sport in the first place. Watching the Paralympics won’t just change how you see disability. It will change how you see sport itself.
Susan G. Zieff is Professor of Kinesiology at San Francisco State University and an independent filmmaker.
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Could Trump declare a national emergency to control voting in the 2026 midterms? An analysis of emergency powers, election law, and Congress’s role in protecting democracy.
Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash
To Save Democracy, Congress Must Curtail the President’s Emergency Powers
Mar 11, 2026
On February 26, the Washington Post reported that allies of President Trump are urging him to declare a national emergency so that he can issue rules and regulations concerning voting in the 2026 election. The alleged emergency arises from the threat of foreign interference in our electoral process.
That threat is based on now fully debunked reports that China manipulated registration and voting in 2020. The National Intelligence Council explained that there were “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”
With respect to China, the NIC concluded that it “ did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.” Moreover, the report made it clear “that it would be difficult for a foreign actor to manipulate election processes at scale without detection by intelligence collection on the actors themselves, through physical and cyber security monitoring around voting systems across the country, or in post-election audits.”
The Post says that those conclusions do not seem to be dissuading the president and his supporters from their plan for an executive order to “mandate voter ID and ban mail ballots in November’s midterm elections.”
The declaration of a national emergency of the kind Trump might invoke would be unprecedented and extraordinarily disruptive. But it is just the latest expression of a long-standing shift of power from Congress to the president.
It is time for Congress to stand up for democracy by reversing that trend. To start, it should undertake a comprehensive review of all legislation that now grants the president emergency powers of the kind that the president might use to take control of the November election.
It should repeal those grants except where it is demonstrably necessary for the president to retain the ability to declare emergencies and to act on the basis of such a declaration. And the bar should be set very high for identifying those instances.
Writing in 2023, University of Virginia Law professor Saikrishna Prakash explained that “the Constitution… does not grant the president much in the way of emergency authority. The executive power,” he adds, “was not understood to authorize the presidency’s predecessors to act contrary to existing law or to take whatever measures they deemed necessary to handle some perceived crisis.“
From time to time, Congress has stepped in to fill the void, authorizing presidents to respond to emergencies when they arise.
As Prakash observes, “most emergency authority rests on statutes passed by Congress. There are two sorts of statutes: ex ante delegations, passed before a crisis, and ex post delegations, passed in the wake of an emergency… (e.g., the Patriot Act).”
“The modern emergency regime is regulated, in the lightest of ways,” he notes, “by the 1976 National Emergencies Act. Among other things, the act requires publication of emergencies in the Federal Register and certain reporting by the president. The rules limit the duration of an emergency to one year, but they also contemplate the president extending the declaration for another year. That is one reason why some emergency declarations never terminate.”
The open-ended quality of those declarations is one of the reasons Congress needs to step in. Emergency declarations, like loaded guns, should not be left lying around waiting for a power-hungry president to use one to advance an agenda that could not be advanced in any other way.
The Brennan Center for Justice has identified “150 statutory powers that may become available to the president upon declaration of a national emergency.” At the time, Elizabeth Gotein, a Brennan Center staff member, told NPR that “emergency powers are a little bit scary because the entire purpose of them is to give the president a degree of flexibility and legal leeway that Congress does not think would be appropriate during non-emergency times…. “
“What Congress does,” Gotein explained, “is grant the president this really extraordinary degree of power or discretion or flexibility in order to temporarily address the emergency until it passes or until Congress has time to enact legislation if the crisis becomes actually more of a new normal.”
This works if Congress is judicious in doing that. Alas, it has not been.
It has been eager to delegate its authority and, in so doing, to shift responsibility for guiding the country in times of crisis to the executive. The scope of the emergency powers the president can exercise is vast and not well understood by most lawmakers or citizens.
Gotein offered many chilling examples of what a president can do with those powers. To mention just one example, she points out that “there is a provision from the Communications Act [of 1934, amended in 1942] that allows the president to take over or shut down radio or wire communications facilities if he declares a national emergency or a threat of war. That provision was last invoked during World War II, when wire communications meant telephone calls or telegrams.”
“Today,” she notes, “it could arguably be interpreted to allow the president to exert control over U.S.-based Internet traffic.
During his service in the White House, President Trump has shown an unusual proclivity for extending executive authority and for declaring emergencies to do so. The New York Times describes his usual way of doing this as follows:
“The United States is a nation in crisis, President Trump says. The problems are both profound and urgent. He knows how to fix them, but his ideas are hard to implement: They require new legislation or lumbering legal petitions. But there’s a way around that. The law often gives the president new and broad powers in a state of emergency.”
Last June, NPR said that “Trump invoked emergency powers more times in his first 100 days than any other modern president has in that time.” Nothing has changed since then.
With respect to the 2026 midterms, Peter Ticktin, one of the people pushing for a declaration of emergency, argues, “The President of the United States may invoke emergency powers in response to an election emergency involving foreign interference, provided certain statutory and procedural requirements are met. The authority to do so primarily derives from the National Emergencies Act (NEA) and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).”
Recalling the danger that dormant emergency powers pose for democracy, he argues that a precedent was set by “Executive Order 13848, issued under the IEEPA and NEA (during Trump’s first term), (which) declared a national emergency to address foreign interference in U.S. elections, citing such interference as an extraordinary threat to national security and foreign policy.”
In Gotein’s view, that is all nonsense. For example, “Nothing in IEEPA,” she suggests, “displaces or overrides federal laws prohibiting interference with elections. Any attempt by this administration to seize or ban mail-in ballots or voting machines during an election would clearly constitute such interference.”
If she is right, that may make a good argument in court. But it may not reach the Supreme Court in time to prevent the president from dictating the terms on which elections are conducted six months from now.
Meantime, Congress should do its work and help preserve democracy by restricting the occasions for the kind of mischief that we might see this year.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
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A protest group called "Hot Mess" hold up signs of Jeffrey Epstein in front of the Federal courthouse on July 8, 2019 in New York City.
(Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
Elite Insulation and the Fragility of Equal Access
Mar 11, 2026
In America: What We Want, What We Have, What We Need, I argued that despite partisan division, Americans share core expectations. They want upward mobility that feels real. They want elections that are credible. They want markets where new entrants can compete. They want rules that bind concentrated wealth. They want stability without stagnation.
The Epstein case directly tests those expectations.
The question is not merely about individual criminal conduct. It is whether our institutions visibly constrain wealth and influence the same way they constrain ordinary citizens.
A republic can survive inequality of outcome. It cannot survive inequality of standing before the law.
What We Know
The basic record is clear.
Jeffrey Epstein entered a 2008 plea agreement in Florida. In 2019, he was charged with federal sex trafficking. He later died in custody while awaiting trial. Ghislaine Maxwell was later convicted in 2021.
The U.S. Department of Justice oversaw the prosecutions. Civil settlements followed. A conviction was secured.
What persists is public unease about the earlier plea agreement, the scope of disclosure, sealed documents, and whether the broader network of associations was fully examined.
The governance question is not whether unnamed individuals are guilty. It is whether the process looks consistent, transparent, and insulated from status.
What We Have
We have functioning courts. We have federal prosecutors. We have investigative capacity. We have convictions.
Yet several structural features strain confidence:
- Heavy reliance on negotiated plea agreements.
- Extensive use of sealed settlements and confidentiality provisions.
- Prosecutorial discretion that is often opaque to the public.
- Legal complexity that allows well-resourced defendants to extend and shape proceedings.
This does not prove coordinated protection. It does create conditions where outcomes can look uneven, particularly when defendants sit inside elite networks.
Modern democracies concentrate influence in relatively small circles of wealth and access. Board memberships overlap. Philanthropic institutions interlock. Political and financial leaders share advisors. Platforms intersect. That proximity is not conspiracy. It does raise reputational stakes.
When criminal allegations arise within that ecosystem, institutions face a dual challenge. Enforce the law. Preserve visible impartiality.
If confidence falters, the damage spreads beyond this case.
Not a Partisan Story
Epstein’s documented associations spanned political parties and national borders. Oversight intensity often rises when one party is out of power and sees investigative opportunity. That is a structural incentive.
If accountability depends on partisan leverage, it becomes episodic rather than systemic. Investigations start to look political rather than neutral.
That perception is destabilizing, regardless of which party benefits.
The deeper issue is institutional design. Are mechanisms of scrutiny durable enough to operate consistently, independent of political timing?
What We Need
Equal standing before the law is not a slogan. It is institutional infrastructure.
Strengthening credibility does not require dramatic new powers. It requires tightening procedural discipline in areas where opacity has weakened confidence.
- Clearer public standards for federal non-prosecution agreements. When high-profile agreements lack clear explanation, confidence erodes; standardized post-case summaries would make prosecutorial reasoning visible without compromising discretion.
- Independent review procedures for plea agreements involving minors. Plea deals in cases involving minors carry heightened weight; structured secondary review would help ensure consistency and documented victim consultation.
- Greater transparency in cases of substantial public interest, with defined limits on sealed records. Prolonged sealing fuels suspicion; time-bound judicial review would balance privacy protections with public accountability.
- Strengthened custodial oversight protocols. Deaths in federal custody, especially in prominent cases, damage institutional credibility; required IG summaries after high-profile custodial incidents would strengthen confidence in process integrity.
- Bipartisan oversight mechanisms designed to function outside electoral cycles. When investigative intensity appears to fluctuate with partisan control, trust declines; standing oversight focused on process compliance would reduce the perception of episodic accountability.
These adjustments do not promise perfect outcomes. They make the reasoning visible.
Closing the Gap
In America: What We Want, What We Have, What We Need, I argued that Americans expect rules that bind concentrated wealth.
What we want is equal standing before the law.
What we have is a functioning system under strain.
What we need is procedural clarity strong enough to withstand elite proximity and partisan shifts.
The Epstein case is not primarily a scandal story. It is a stress test.
When institutions demonstrate that wealth does not confer insulation, legitimacy rises. When procedures appear opaque, legitimacy erodes.
A durable republic depends on visible constraint, not rhetoric. The question is not whether elites collude. The question is whether institutions are demonstrably stronger than the networks that surround them.
That answer will shape public trust far beyond this case.
Edward Saltzberg is the Executive Director of the Security and Sustainability Forum and writes The Stability Brief.
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