On May 22, 2026 Kevin Warsh was sworn in as the seventeenth chair of the Federal Reserve. Justice Clarence Thomas administered the oath, in the East Room of the White House. President Trump, standing beside him, offered a striking benediction: “I want Kevin to be totally independent and do a great job.”

Warsh has so far built his reform agenda around communication — shorter policy statements, a tighter message, a central bank more disciplined about what it signals to the public. He used the phrase “regime change” in his confirmation testimony to describe the overhaul he has in mind. A chair this attentive to signals opened his tenure with a loud one: the oath taken inside the White House, from a justice closely identified with one wing of American politics, surrounded by Cabinet officials and politically allied lawmakers.

There’s a temptation to read the staging as a verdict on his independence. Before yielding to it, consider Paul Volcker. In 1979 he took the same oath in that same East Room, with President Carter at the podium and the oath administered by a federal judge from Carter’s own side of the spectrum. Volcker then defied two presidents and broke the back of inflation at enormous political cost to both. Alan Greenspan, sworn in at the White House himself in 1987, later called Volcker “the most effective chairman in the history of the Federal Reserve.” The choice of setting made neither man a servant of the president beside him. A justice from either wing sends the same signal — which is to say, no reliable signal at all.

What matters is whether the person taking the oath will hold the line when a president leans on him. Volcker held it. Richard Nixon’s chairman, Arthur Burns, did not — he kept money loose into the 1972 election and helped touch off a decade of inflation. Same institution, same pressures, opposite spines. Effective monetary policy has always relied upon the independent streak of the person in the chair.

That is the vulnerability in the system. A central bank has no army and no budget of its own; its authority is almost entirely a matter of credibility. The public must believe that its decisions follow evidence rather than the wishes of whoever occupies the Oval Office. We guard that belief with norms, customs, and the character of individuals, and we are about to entrust it once more to the character of one individual.

The pressure on Chairman Warsh is not subtle. The president has said he wanted a chair who agreed with him on cutting rates. Warsh’s confirmation was the most divisive in the Fed’s modern history, 54 to 45, almost entirely along party lines. The nomination advanced only after a Justice Department investigation had shadowed outgoing Chairman Jerome Powell who has since chosen to remain on the Board of Governors rather than leave — a not-so-quiet signal that he feels the institution needs steadying.

The Fed was created by statute — the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Its independence rests on even less: a 1951 handshake with the Treasury and decades of norm. None of it is constitutional. In an era of Congresses less eager to challenge a sitting president, does a century-old law and a 75-year-old understanding effectively guarantee independence?

My book proposes eleven structural amendments to the Constitution. One of them, A Right to Economic Competency, would lift the Fed’s independence out of dependency on norms and customs and into the founding document itself. The goals of the central bank would be clearly defined. Supermajority thresholds would be required for appointing and removing governors. Termination without cause would be prohibited. Leaving seats empty would no longer create any political advantage. Mandated audits and Congressional oversight would be preserved but clearly defined. The fundamental premise is that character can fail; a president can lean; a chair can fold. A structure well defined in the Constitution removes those risks and provides greater confidence that the actions of the Bank would be driven by competent, objective interpretation of market dynamics.

I hope Warsh proves to be more Volcker than Burns — that he turns out to be one of the most effective and most fiercely independent chairs the Fed has ever had.

Therein lies the problem. The strength of the dollar in my pocket, the rate on my mortgage, and the credit of the United States in every market on earth should not depend on my hope that the right person sits in the chair. Hope is not a system. A constitution can be.

Leave a comment

In 1976 the NFL banned spearing — leading with the crown of the helmet. In 2005 it outlawed the horse-collar tackle. In 2009 it tightened protections for quarterbacks’ knees. In 2012 it suspended coaches and players from the New Orleans Saints for running a bounty pool that paid cash for hits meant to injure. More recently, it changed kickoff rules to protect special teams players from vicious hits. Every few seasons, the league rewrites its book. Why bother?

Because winning has become extraordinarily valuable. The least valuable franchise, the Cincinnati Bengals, is worth about $5.5 billion; the Dallas Cowboys, roughly $13 billion. Top players are making $50M+ per year. Top coaches, $20M+. When the prize is that large, everyone in the system feels the pull to find an edge. Some edges amount to hurting the other guy badly enough that he plays scared, or doesn’t play at all. This isn’t about bad people but about what happens when incentives meet human nature. The athletes of today are no more ruthless than when the NFL began; the prize just got bigger and the methods got smarter.

There are some things however that the league never touches. The object of the game hasn’t changed since leather helmets: move the ball, score, win a fair contest of strength, agility, skill and nerve. That is what fans fell for a century ago, and what they still love today. The rules adapt to protect that core, never to chase a trend. When it works, you barely notice - the game still looks like football. Changes are made in service of preservation of the core principles, not the pursuit of novelty.

Look closer at how an NFL rule gets changed, and you see some recognizable structures. The players don’t get a vote. The owners do - the people who answer for the whole enterprise, not the score from any given game. They listen to coaches, players, and the union, and then they decide. But a simple majority can’t impose new rules. It takes 24 of 32 owners, a three-quarters supermajority to make a change. A 2025 proposal to ban the “tush push,” a short-yardage play named for the “hands on” way a quarterback is shoved forward, drew 22 votes - a clear majority – and still failed. Changing the rules of the game is supposed to be hard. The NFL cannot let a bare majority, or a single team chasing its own advantage, rewrite the rules and risk fundamentally changing the core principles of the game.

How does this relate to our American Constitution?

It, too, is a rulebook for a high-stakes contest, and the Framers understood the game perfectly. “If men were angels,” James Madison wrote, “no government would be necessary.” They assumed ambition and faction were permanent features of human nature, and built structure to channel them. So they designed a core which isn’t intended to change: self-government, liberty, power answerable to the people - as compelling now as in 1787. They sought to preserve that core by making it hard to change. Amending the Constitution takes two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states, supermajorities stacked on supermajorities, so no passing faction can rewrite the foundation in a fit of temper.

Here is the part we seem to have forgotten. In the NFL the rule-makers sit above the players, and the fans sit above everyone. Ignore the wishes of the people in the stands too long and the money leaves with them; a league without the legitimacy of widespread public support folds. The fans’ ultimate power is the power to walk out. As citizens, ours is supposed to be greater. We don’t just buy tickets, we hold the vote. We choose who plays for how long, and through them, who writes the rules. In effect, the people are the competition committee for American government.

Here’s where it gets messy. In the NFL the rule-writers and the players are different people by design. In our system of government, they’re the same people: the only door to the rulebook runs through Congress and the state legislatures — the very players the rules are meant to bind are the keepers of the rulebook. This may be the deepest fault line in the Constitution, and it’s why one of the amendments I propose, Amendments by the People, would put the people back in control of the rulebook so it would neither calcify to preserve gridlocked interests, nor swing wildly every two-to-four years without accountability.

Hard is fine; amendments to the Constitution should be hard. Changing the rules should require super-majorities to ensure continued appeal to the fans… also known as “legitimacy”. But the Constitution hasn’t been meaningfully amended in over half a century. And yet we’re all keenly aware of how the way the game is played has evolved into unpalatable and potentially dangerous areas.

For now, the rulebook is still ours to defend, we’ve just drifted out of the stands. The players have begun officiating their own game: writing the rules they play by, waving off every change that might cost them an edge. A league whose fans went home wouldn’t survive a season; a republic whose citizens leave the stands won’t either. The rules aren’t the enemy of the game — they’re how the people keep it worth playing. Reclaiming them starts with remembering that we own the league and the teams, and accepting responsibility for reviewing the rulebook as necessary to preserve the core principles we cherish.

Leave a comment

Most of what holds America together as a democracy never reaches a courtroom. We argue about the Constitution constantly, but the arguing happens around the edges. Underneath sits an enormous body of agreement we frequently overlook: that government draws its authority from the consent of the governed, that no one stands above the law, that power is divided precisely so it can’t pool in one set of hands. We don’t litigate the core of these because we don’t dispute them. They are the foundation; the load-bearing walls of our democracy exactly because they’ve become assumed.

The fights we do have tend to emanate from one of two camps. One, often called “Originalism,” guards the anchor. It reads the Constitution for the meaning its words carried when they were ratified, and warns that once judges interpret “principles” instead of text, unelected lawyers start imposing their individual preferences on the founding document. That fear is real and supported by extensive case evidence. And the camp is less rigid than its critics suppose. Even Justice Antonin Scalia, originalism’s fiercest champion, recognized that the open-ended clauses — due process, equal protection, cruel and unusual — “have to apply to new phenomena that didn’t exist at the time.”

The other camp, commonly called “Living Constitutionalism,” guards against irrelevance. It reads the Constitution as a foundation of core principles meant to breathe and evolve with society, and warns that a document frozen in 1789 will deny rights to people the framers never imagined — or deliberately excluded due to circumstances at the time. That fear is also real, and also supported by extensive case evidence. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it in 1920, a constitutional question “must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in that of what was said a hundred years ago.”

Not surprisingly, each camp sees the other’s danger far more clearly than its own. Strict textual guidance alone cannot decide the hard cases, because the hardest clauses (some cited by Scalia above) were written in open and somewhat ambiguous terms. Parsing the dictionary doesn’t resolve them; it merely tends to disguise the judgment call being made. Yet “breath and evolve” has no brakes. If the document means whatever a generation wants it to mean, it means nothing fixed, and a constitution without anchor cannot withstand the tides of majoritarianism that would otherwise push it around with regularity.

Almost no one actually lives at either pole (although we frequently like to accuse Justices of the Supreme Court of doing so). In practice, most judges, lawmakers, and citizens reach for a sensible result and then adopt whichever theory justifies it. That improvised pragmatism has quietly run the country for more than two centuries. Its weakness is that it has no simple label to grasp, no easy-to-label theory, and as a result, few recognized defenders. The poles have clean stories and talking points that win arguments and raise money. The middle has only instincts — which is why it governs in practice and loses in public, while the edges grow louder and better funded every year.

The danger is that a camp that cannot defend itself in public eventually loses the ground it holds in practice. As the poles attract more money and capture more of the public argument, they capture the appointments too — and the courts become one more prize in the political war, the Constitution one more weapon in it. The middle isn’t losing because it’s wrong. It’s losing because it’s mute. No grand new theory or simple callsign will stop the erosion. The middle just needs a clearer vocabulary: a simple, shared language that helps an ordinary citizen cut through the noise and sort our disagreements into useful categories before we jump in and fight about them.

These categories might be delineated as:

• some constitutional principles we genuinely share;

• some we agree on in general but contest in the specifics (how much process is “due,” what level of burden constitutes “unreasonable”);

• and some we contest at their root, where patriots of equal good faith simply cannot reconcile an absolute principle (e.g. abortion or death penalty).

By thinking about these categories when considering an issue, we can escape the gravitational pull of manipulation and wade more confidently into any argument with a single first question: am I being sold a settled principle as though it were contested, or a contested value as though it were settled?

Where an issue is contested at its roots, it probably doesn’t belong to nine appointees. It belongs to we the people through the vote and, where needed, through amendment. Clearly that carries an obvious risk: majorities can run over minorities. The best way to mitigate that risk is to set the bar for majority rule to be broad supermajorities, popular and geographic. The goal for root-level change isn’t just the “resolution” of that issue, but also the preservation of democratic legitimacy. Satisfying both criteria demands that changes of great magnitude achieve a true mandate, not a fleeting fifty-one percent. This is particularly important because, on the losing end of a root principle argument, a member of the minority has only the shared and undisputed principles and guarantees of our Constitution to console themselves. They can lose a fight and live to fight another day. They can trust that while the arc of “justice” may be long and the pain very real, history shows that the floor has tended to rise over time.

None of this resolves the argument between anchor and relevance; between “originalists” and “living constitutionalists”. It can’t. The philosophies don’t reconcile. What it can do is move the fight to a more productive ground — out of the courts, where irreconcilable values disguise themselves as legal questions, and into the open, where citizens argue them as what they are. We frame the arguments in more constructive ways to improve the odds of both settling matters and preserving the legitimacy of the courts and the Constitution. We don’t “fix” the problem. We relocate it.

Leave a comment

Share

And like you, I’ve watched with increasing concern over the past few decades as our democracy has been grinding to a halt and our institutions eroding right before our eyes. Political gridlock, fueled by massive amounts of money, is turning every dimension of government policy into an existential battle of win-at-all-cost and destroying our ability to argue productively. And that is the great irony, as the fundamental benefit of living in a democracy is the ability to argue and have each voice counted, not just leave determinations to be made by others with hidden (or obvious) parochial interests.

Doing nothing just no longer seems to be an option I can live with.

I’ve dedicated a career to building companies and solving complex problems at the intersection of human nature, incentives, structures, and systems design. I’ve worked inside big organizations, built new companies from scratch, sat on for- and non-profit boards, mentored entrepreneurs, and made investments in many promising ideas. I’ve witnessed many types of approaches succeed and even more fail. Along the way I’ve learned to tell the difference between problems that are merely hard, and those that are structural — where the difficulty isn’t the opinions or beliefs or behaviors of the people involved, but the system they’re operating in. Fix the structure and the incentives and the system will right itself.

What I see in American government today is a structural problem. Not a character problem. The people in Washington are not especially corrupt or uniquely stupid. Many of them are genuinely capable, altruistically motivated people operating inside a system that has been slowly, incrementally degraded — rules have been bent, norms discarded, institutions increasingly weaponized by whoever happens to hold power at the moment. Each tit-for-tat escalation makes the next one feel justified. Each broken norm makes the next one easier to break.

This isn’t a partisan observation. Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and Independents are all equally at fault, and equally victimized. There are muddy footprints on both sides of the aisle. And it isn’t a recent phenomenon. It has been building for decades, accelerating now with each election cycle. And the erosion of democratic principles will continue regardless of which party wins the next election, because elections don’t fix structural problems, they merely exploit them. Only structural reforms change the game.

A Walk I Keep Coming Back To

For several years I had the good fortune to live in Philadelphia, just a few blocks from where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were first committed to paper. I walked those streets often — sometimes deliberately, more often just getting from one place to another. But on certain days, usually in October when the air had that particular crispness and the leaves were turning and crunching underfoot, I would find myself slowing down on the grounds around Independence Hall and feeling something I can only describe as a presence.

Not supernatural. Historical. The weight of what happened in that building is still there in the brick and the cobblestones.

What struck me was not the genius of the men who worked inside — though the result of their work is genuinely remarkable. No, they were merely normal men with quite a bit at stake. What struck me was their seriousness. They understood the risks of their work perhaps better than they could even imagine the rewards. They had read the history of what happens when republics fail. They were not naive about human nature. And they chose to build something that accounted for human nature rather than pretending it away — a system of engineering rather than a system of faith.

I imagine that was their motivation to build in a repair mechanism. Article V of the Constitution gives the American people the power to amend their governing document when it stops working. It has been used just twenty-seven times. It hasn’t been used successfully in over thirty years. And almost no one is seriously talking about using it now — at precisely the moment when it is most needed.

Can We Fix It?

My book, Right the Republic is meant to put forth practical and structural solutions, not just point fingers or sensationalize the problems. It identifies a few of the root causes of our declining trust in our government and institutions, and then proposes eleven constitutional amendments – in plain English, no law degree required – designed to fix those problems for the long term in ways that political partisans won’t be able to ignore or circumvent.

And the only thing I know for sure is that I’m wrong.

First: first drafts rarely survive contact with reality, regardless of how thoughtful or well-researched they may be. I’ve argued these ideas with skeptics across the political spectrum, done my homework, consulted people smarter than me on the specifics. But I harbor no illusion that I’ve cracked the code.

Second: that’s not actually the point. The point is to start a serious conversation — with specific, concrete proposals on the table as a place to begin the dialogue, rather than vague gestures or grandiose dreams. It is much easier to improve a deficient first draft than to start from a blank page. I mean that as a feature, not a disclaimer.

Third: you won’t find anything in the book about abortion, gun rights, immigration, gender, tax policy, education, religion, or the proper role/size of government. Those are genuine, important, legitimately contested debates — and they belong in the democratic process. Those are examples of the things we should be arguing about. Instead, the amendments in this book address the structural failures that prevent those debates from being conducted in a constructive manner and resolved productively. To use a structural metaphor, the book doesn’t aspire to determine what every building in the country should look like. It’s merely trying to propose some new building codes so whatever gets built doesn’t collapse when earthquakes or tornadoes appear - as they always do.

Who This Is For

If you have already decided that one party is the solution and the other is the problem, this book will frustrate you. I am not making that argument. I don’t believe it. I think there are heroes and zeros on both sides.

If you are somewhere in the large and growing middle — genuinely troubled by what you’re watching, unconvinced that the next election will fix it, suspicious of both the partisan left, the partisan right, and those who profess to be neither- you’ll like it. If you’re hungry for a conversation that treats you as an adult — this book was written for you. If you’ve got any latent optimism left, I’ll try to help you activate it.

And if you read it and conclude that I’ve gotten something importantly wrong, I genuinely want to hear from you. Not as a courtesy. Because the goal here is a better argument, not a winning one.

Benjamin Franklin, leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787, was asked what kind of government had been created. His answer: “A republic — if you can keep it.”

That challenge has never felt more urgent. And unlike a lot of the problems we argue about, this one actually has a solution — if we’re serious enough to pursue it.

I hope you’ll join the conversation.

Right the Republic publishes in the fall of 2026. Follow this page to join the journey — and to tell me where I got it wrong.