This episode of Braver Angels puts a Biden supporter in the hot seat. Wilk Wilkinson, a conservative Republican, interviews Jordan Carmon, a staunch Biden supporter, on everything from Hunter Biden to January 6th — showing us what's possible when we bring good faith to our richest, most passionate disagreements.
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America the Brave
May 23, 2026
As part of a collaboration between The Fulcrum's NextGen initiative and Made By Us, The Fulcrum is publishing Letters to America, a series created through the Youth250 project that invites Gen Z to reflect on the nation’s past, present, and future as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary.
I would not have used American to describe myself for a very long time.
I was five years old when I first understood what it meant to leave something behind.
My father had found an opportunity, a fresh start, and so we packed what we could and flew north from Caracas. I didn't know then that Venezuela was already becoming unrecognizable. I only knew that the life we were leaving had been, in every way that mattered, ours.
And America did not feel like mine for a long time.
I ate the hot dogs. I said the Pledge. I learned to conjugate in English before I fully understood what citizenship meant. But identity doesn't follow a schedule or a diet, and for years I held my Americanness at arm's length, not because I didn't love the country, but because I wasn't sure it loved me back the way it loved everyone else. The paperwork made that clear. My mother couldn't work. Our legal status depended on institutions that didn't know our names or care about us.
Even then, I think I was already American in all the ways that counted.
The thing that makes someone American is not the documentation. It is the refusal to stop caring about what this country could be. My father watched the 2016 results come in and, for a moment, questioned whether we had made the right choice. I was in elementary school. My teacher had run a mock election, and Hillary won by a landslide, with Obama in second place, because we were seven and didn't fully understand how it worked. But I remember the weight of that night. I remember what it looked like on my father's face. He had left a country because he believed in democratic institutions, and here, at the kitchen table, democracy felt fragile in a way that was eerily familiar.
That recognition and grief for democracy are the most American things I have ever felt.
Because to grieve for a country, you have to love it first. And loving a country, really loving it, means seeing it clearly: not as myth, not as symbol, but as a project that is always unfinished and always worth fighting for.
I did not become interested in civics because I had answers. Rather, I became interested because I had questions I couldn't stop asking. I flew alone to Washington, D.C. for the first time, in the middle of the biggest IT outage in years, and landed just in time to learn that Joe Biden had dropped out of the race. I lobbied in the halls of a government I had studied mostly from the outside. I stood in rooms where history was moving and tried to understand what my voice was meant to do there.
What I found, every time, was that service was the answer to the questions I kept asking. Not service as performance. The kind that shows you that your presence matters, that you are not a guest in the project of democracy, but an active contributor to it.
No one believes in this country the way people who chose it do. My family did not come here for easy wealth or a clean break from the past. We came because we believed that a country organized around written rights, with institutions designed to outlast any one leader, was worth the sacrifice of everything familiar. We came because authoritarianism teaches you, very efficiently, to love the things it destroys.
I was naturalized in April of 2025. On paper, that is when I became American. But I think I knew it long before then, sometime between the mock elections and the first time I walked into a room in Washington and said what I believed out loud to someone with the power to act on it. Sometime between the arepas we never gave up and the Pledge I said every morning in a language that still feels borrowed.
But I am, in every way I know how to measure it, American, and I am home.
Emiliana Korin, 16, Athens, GA
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a computer chip with the letter a on top of it
Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash
We're Failing Gen Alpha
May 22, 2026
Just about around 2035, we’ll be celebrating the first Gen Alpha graduates from college. Hallmark is going to need to work on some new cards before then.
A few recommendations:
- “You can’t believe every job forecast. But we still believe in you!”
- “Underemployment isn’t that bad. You’ll find a good job soon!”
- “Sorry. Good luck.”
My hunch is that the graduates will ask for something stronger than cake when they realize we missed the window to update our labor market for the Age of AI. As of April 29, 2026, expert forecasters expect unemployment among recent grads to reach 13.5 percent in 2035. Underemployment may be near 60 percent. Given that most of us will pack an umbrella if we see a 50 percent chance of rain, if policymakers think these experts--including renowned economists--have a coin flip’s chance of being right, then they have some work to do.
Four years into this AI moment, policymakers have been caught flat-footed — waiting for the dust to settle before attempting to intervene. In earlier eras, this may have been a wise strategy. But waiting carries its own costs, and those costs compound. Every year policymakers defer is a year the labor market drifts further from the rules built for it. By the time things begin to settle down (if ever), our Gen Alpha grads will be justifiably upset that we did not more seriously prepare for a world in which their job prospects were historically dismal.
Now’s the time for dynamic legislation. Lawmakers cannot move at the speed of AI. That’s by design. The Framers knew that the only thing worse than inaction is hasty, heavy-handed, and practically irreversible legislation. They designed a process to methodically vet proposals and wait until a durable consensus formed. Good policy results from deliberation and data, not panic and popular pressure. Rather than try to speed up the legislative process, we simply need to alter its focus.
Instead of passing a static law that effectively assumes tomorrow will look like today, state and federal legislatures need to adopt the practice of legislating for many different tomorrows. For example, this may look like the creation of an AI Literacy Corps--made up of individuals between 18 and 30--tasked with helping small businesses and nonprofits learn how to use AI tools. This massive effort would lie dormant until unemployment among recent graduates reached nine percent, at which point an AI Literacy Corps activates automatically. Suddenly, if and when things go south for young people, Congress will not start from step one. Their work will have shifted from ideation to implementation. Like the Civilian Conservation Corps, it’d be a means to keep young folks in the employment game--learning new skills, meeting new people, and actively contributing to a brighter future.
Of course, Congress could opt to get even more creative. They could call for a 'Launch Fund' available to young Americans if unemployment hit 15 percent. The fund could capitalize new ventures started by recent graduates, underwrite relocation to regions with stronger labor markets, or finance the rapid credentialing programs that AI-native industries will demand. The structure matters more than the specifics: a defined pool of capital, a clear trigger, a defined beneficiary population, and rules written in advance rather than improvised in crisis. Lawmakers might even prefer a portfolio of metrics to determine whether a particular policy response has been triggered. They could appoint a council of independent economists to set the thresholds. The permutations are endless, and that's the point.
We do not know what's ahead for the AI economy. Economists expect a transition period from today's jobs to those of the AI economy that may be particularly painful for young people. The hope is that the transition will be short and the jobs of tomorrow will emerge sooner than expected.
Picture two versions of 2035. In the first, Congress treated forecast uncertainty as a reason to prepare. The Literacy Corps stood ready. The Launch Fund had rules already written. When unemployment crossed the trigger, programs were activated, and graduates went to work. In the second, Congress treated forecast uncertainty as a reason to wait. The hearings began the month the unemployment numbers landed. The bill markups stretched into the following Congress. The graduates waited.
Dynamic legislation is not a workaround of the Framers' design. It is their design taken seriously. Deliberation about contingencies is still deliberation. Triggers set in advance, by a Congress acting in calm rather than crisis, are the opposite of panic legislation. The methodical vetting the Framers prized happens before the storm rather than during it.
The graduates of 2035 are eight years old today. We know roughly how many of them there will be. We know roughly when they will enter the labor market. We know roughly what the economists fear awaits them. We can keep hoping the forecasts are wrong. Or we can legislate as though we believed the forecasts we commissioned.
Hallmark will write whatever cards the moment calls for. Congress should write the laws that make the more congratulatory cards possible.
Kevin Frazier is an adjunct professor of Delaware Law and an affiliated scholar of emerging technology and constitutional law at St. Thomas University College of Law.
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Article V Convention is a mechanism in the U.S. Constitution that empowers state legislatures to bypass Congress and propose amendments to the Constitution.
After Callais: The Amendment Agenda the Framers Built
May 22, 2026
On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais. Louisiana had been ordered by a federal court to draw a majority-Black congressional district. It drew one. The Court held the drawing unconstitutional and rewrote the Section 2 standard, raising the evidentiary burden for successful challenges and immunizing maps that satisfy a state’s stated partisan goals. As Justice Kagan wrote in dissent, the trap closes perfectly. States cannot draw majority-minority districts, and the mechanism that would require them to cannot be satisfied under the new standard.
Shelby County v. Holder (2013) removed Section 5 preclearance — the preventive mechanism. Callais has removed Section 2 enforcement — the remedial mechanism. Both statutory pathways to voting rights protection are now closed.
This is the third time. The republic tried to establish voting rights in the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. The Supreme Court dismantled the enforcement mechanisms within thirty years. The republic tried again with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Supreme Court has dismantled those in two rounds, thirteen years apart. What statutes give, courts can take away — twice in the same century, specifically against voting rights, with the same result.
This is one failure, replicated across generations that have tried to correct it through ordinary channels. The question is what happens when the ordinary channels run out.
The answer is in Article V. It was deliberately put there.
Article V provides two routes for constitutional amendment. The route everyone knows runs through Congress: a two-thirds vote in both chambers, and three-fourths of the states ratifying. The route almost no one uses runs through the states: two-thirds of state legislatures — thirty-four — apply to Congress for a constitutional convention, which proposes amendments that must still be ratified by three-fourths of states — thirty-eight. Hamilton described this second route in Federalist 85 as “peremptory,” not optional, not discretionary, but obligatory when the states demand it. Madison designed it for the moment we are in: the institution most in need of change is the institution that controls the first route. A Congress whose members spend four to five hours a day on donor calls in a building across the street from the Capitol, which they are not allowed to use for fundraising, will not reform the campaign finance system that sustains them. An unaccountable Court cannot be appealed. The convention route bypasses both.
The objection that a convention could exceed its mandate, as the 1787 convention did, producing an entirely new constitution rather than revising the Articles, deserves a direct answer. I do not claim the risk is zero. What I claim is that in 1787, there was no existing ratification threshold attached to whatever the convention might produce. Today’s process requires thirty-eight state legislatures to approve any proposal. The “runaway convention” is a fear about what could be proposed. The 38-state threshold is the safeguard that determines what actually becomes law. Whatever a convention proposed — abolish the Second Amendment, install a parliamentary system, impose a balanced budget — would face ratification votes in state legislatures that would not approve it. Any amendment that clears thirty-eight states has achieved genuine supermajority consensus across the ideological range that ordinary legislation cannot reach. The 38-state threshold is not a technicality. It is the mechanism that makes constitutional modernization compatible with constitutional continuity.
What that compatibility looks like in practice is worth being concrete about. An amendment that clears the thirty-eight-state ratification threshold — whether proposed by Congress or by a convention — enters the Constitution by the same mechanism that produced the Bill of Rights, the Reconstruction Amendments, and the Nineteenth Amendment. The continuity is in the threshold itself: whatever clears it inherits the legitimacy of what cleared it before, and whatever cannot does not become law, regardless of how passionately a single coalition might press for it. The mechanism is conservative in design and modernizing in effect. That is not a paradox. It is the original design working.
Three amendments follow directly from what Callais and Shelby County exposed: an affirmative right to vote, independent redistricting, and a campaign finance amendment.
An affirmative right to vote. The Constitution contains no such provision. What exists is a series of amendments prohibiting denial of the vote on specific grounds (race, sex, age, poll tax), none of which creates an affirmative, judicially enforceable right. Under the current framework, when the government restricts the franchise, challengers must prove a specific statutory violation, and courts can narrow the standards for that violation. An affirmative constitutional right inverts the burden: the government restricting the franchise faces a presumption of unconstitutionality and must justify the restriction against a fundamental right. The amendment does not guarantee courts will interpret it correctly. It guarantees that the constitutional question, when litigated, is the right one.
Independent redistricting. The Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause held that partisan gerrymandering is a “political question beyond the reach of federal courts” — a conclusion Justice Kagan called, accurately, abdication. In the 2024 cycle, gerrymandering gave one party approximately sixteen additional House seats in states it controlled after the 2020 census. Michigan implemented independent redistricting through a 2018 voter initiative and turned one of the country’s most extreme gerrymanders into genuinely competitive districts in a single election cycle. A constitutional provision requiring independent commissions for congressional seats would accomplish what Rucho explicitly placed beyond the reach of the judiciary. The United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia use independent bodies as a matter of course; none regards this as a radical arrangement.
A campaign finance amendment. Citizens United v. FEC rests on a doctrine of corporate personhood whose foundational precedent is not a judicial holding but a headnote; a summary written by a former railroad executive after a ruling whose own Chief Justice had told him the Court had “avoided meeting the constitutional question.” It was cited as settled law for a century and became the foundation for a decision that produced $4.5 billion in outside spending in the 2024 federal election cycle, $1.9 billion of it from sources that cannot be publicly traced. The amendment I would propose is narrow: it establishes that the government may regulate the expenditure of money in elections to prevent corruption or its appearance, and that this authority extends to corporations and non-natural persons. It restores the regulatory capacity that the Court removed in a decision built on a headnote.
Each of these proposals fills a gap between what constitutional democracy requires and what the current text provides. The organizing principle is completion. The Bill of Rights established what the government cannot do to you. What we have never established, what we have been trying to establish through statute for a hundred and fifty years and losing each time, is what democracy owes you: a vote that counts equally, elections free from unlimited money, maps drawn without a stake in the outcome, a legislature that cannot profit from the power it holds, and courts accountable to democratic time.
Any coalition serious about calling a convention must commit to refusing one thing: a balanced budget amendment. The Convention of States movement, with twenty states past the threshold, lists a BBA among its primary objectives. The intuition is understandable — federal debt exceeds $38 trillion, and annual interest payments now exceed defense spending. The constitutional remedy is wrong. In 2009, a $1.4 trillion countercyclical deficit prevented an economic collapse that economists across the spectrum agree would have been far worse without it. A constitutionalized balanced budget requirement would have made that response impossible. A convention producing a BBA would be worse than no convention at all, and anyone serious about calling one should enter that fight with clear eyes.
As of May 2026, twenty states have passed Convention of States applications — fourteen short of the calling threshold. Wolf-PAC, working the same threshold from a campaign finance direction, has resolutions currently active in three state legislatures. These movements disagree about almost everything. What they share is the recognition that ordinary legislation has failed, and that the convention mechanism exists for this very purpose.
The cross-partisan coalition required to ratify amendments through thirty-eight states is not a coalition of Democrats or Republicans. It is a coalition of Americans who have read the diagnosis the same way: that a court whose recent rulings have undone two generations of statutory voting-rights protection, and a Congress whose conditions of office crowd out the reforms most needed, are eroding the conditions a functioning constitutional republic requires — and who understand that the framers, who anticipated this failure clearly enough to build a bypass for it, left that bypass in Article V. Hamilton called it peremptory. He meant: this is what it is for. The question is whether this generation has the seriousness to use it.
Grayson Royal is a writer based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He writes long-form essays on democratic reform and civic argument. An Eagle Scout, he is not a constitutional lawyer—a fact he considers either the central weakness of his arguments or their most honest feature. He publishes at graysonroyal.substack.com.
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Senator Adam Schiff, D-Calif, speaks at the Brookings Institution panel to make the case for regulating prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket
(Erika Tulfo, Medill News Service)
Kalshi Wants to Help Americans Hedge Risk. Lawmakers Say It’s Just Gambling with a Different Name
May 22, 2026
WASHINGTON – Prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket are facing mounting pressure in Congress as lawmakers debate whether the platforms should be treated as financial exchanges or gambling operations.
The platforms allow users to bet on real-world events from sports to politics, which are classified as a type of financial derivative overseen by the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
But the rapidly growing industry has become a pressing topic on Capitol Hill following a slew of recent scandals, with seven House Democrats urging the House Oversight Committee last week to subpoena prediction markets over concerns of corruption and insider trading.
Last month, U.S. Army soldier Gannon Van Dyke was charged with using classified information to profit from a Polymarket wager related to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January. In the same month, Kalshi fined and suspended three congressional candidates for betting on the outcomes of their own elections.
“Every day, every week, we seem to see a new story, whether it's campaign staffers with internal access to polling betting on things,” said Senator Adam Schiff, D-Calif, at a panel hosted by the Brookings Institution on Monday. “The real winners seem to be these professional market makers, where just about everybody else seems to be losing money.”
There are currently 14 active bills related to prediction markets in Congress, including the Prediction Markets are Gambling Act. The bipartisan bill would amend the Commodity Exchange Act to ban prediction markets from listing contracts that resemble sports bets or casino-style games.
Schiff, one of the bill’s authors, argued that sports betting-related contracts listed on prediction markets constituted gambling and should therefore be regulated by individual states.
He added that he was also concerned about seeing a potential rise in gambling addictions in young people who use prediction market platforms to make bets.
“If you want to game on your phone at age 18 – and maybe even if you’re not 18 – you find a workaround,” Schiff said. “It's just at your fingertips, and you can now link other financial accounts to your prediction account and transfer money easily. Who's guarding against that, and who's looking into what's happening with gambling addiction?”
On prediction market platforms, users can bet on anything from the weather to the number of posts Trump uploads to TruthSocial in a given week. A Harris Poll survey conducted in March on behalf of the National Council on Problem Gambling found that 30% of Americans considered prediction markets similar to gambling, compared with 24% who saw them as financial forecasting and 18% who saw them as a form of investing.
But Kalshi’s general counsel and chief regulatory officer, Rick Heaslip, pushed back against the characterization of the platform as an avenue for 24/7 online gambling, arguing it was a tool people could use to hedge risk. He added that 70% of Kalshi users did not trade on the platform, but used it simply to interpret the news.
“They'll go on Kalshi, they'll check the odds, and they'll say, ‘Was that talking head that I just saw on CNN telling the truth? Were they giving me a real, accurate assessment of what may or may not happen?’ And so Kalshi, as an enterprise, provides that for everybody,” he said.
Heaslip noted that Kalshi has a process for deciding which markets to list and explained that the platform only lists “swaps,” which are events associated with potential economic outcomes.
He pointed to the Met Gala as a recent example, saying that a contract on whether or not a celebrity will wear a certain brand is considered a swap because it carries economic consequences.
“While if I listed a swap on whether or not my neighbor wore a red hat or blue hat tomorrow, that would probably get me into hot water with the FTC very quickly,” he said.
But other panelists questioned the inclusion of sports-related bets, which seemingly lack economic consequences, unlike those concerning the performance of individual athletes.
Sam Henry Lazarus, a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that while he thinks prediction markets have the potential to become important indicators, their inclusion made the platform resemble casino-style gaming.
“They have a ton of social utility, but they have that utility insofar as they're not running sort of a silly race,” he said. “Even if, under the law, you can make the argument that you're not a casino… if it quacks like a casino, and it walks like a casino, it's a casino. And eventually, people are going to vote representatives into office that are going to regulate you like one.”
Erika Tulfo is a reporter covering business and financial policy for Medill News Service.
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