Congress is about to leave town for the midterms, and the inventory of what it finished is short. It sent the president a bill to end penny production. It did not pass anything on AI, a subject every tech CEO and a majority of poll respondents have spent a month saying is urgent. And the Senate blocked a Republican bill restricting stock trades by its own members.

So the one thing that cleared both chambers is the retirement of a coin that costs more to make than it’s worth. I don’t mean that as a cheap shot. Killing the penny is a real decision, with the same shape as everything else: diffuse cost, no organized defender, nobody’s donors hurt. The stock-trading ban fails that test, because the people who’d be restricted are the same people voting. The Atlanta paper’s headline on Ossoff’s opposition is “it’s complicated,” which is what a vote looks like when the honest explanation is that the rule would apply to the voter.

Meanwhile the Court that might actually decide something took up the administration’s policy of detaining people who crossed the border years ago, with no bond hearing. Lower courts split on it. A split like that is how a policy runs for a year or two in two different countries at once, depending on which circuit you were arrested in, until nine people pick one.

I notice the penny is the only item here where the loser gets nothing but a little extra change in a jar. Everything else on the list has actual people on the other side of it. Does that explain the order Congress did things in?

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