Policymakers in Virginia and elsewhere should understand that the justices are serious about not allowing the Second Amendment to be treated like a second-class right anymore. And though there is still substantial room for reasonable regulations, they must be broadly consistent with the nation’s historic tradition of private gun ownership and armed self-defense.

Never is the shameless hypocrisy on greater display than during the funerals of those who did the most to sacrifice the interests of the Americans who lack genuine representation in Washington. Such was Tuesday’s commemoration of the passing of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R‑SC).

Graham was a storied member of the Washington elite, a political animal guaranteed public attention irrespective of the foolishness of his positions, hypocrisies of his claims, and failures of his policies. He was one of the many influential denizens of the nation’s capital, a class whose members typically spend their days mulcting the public, enriching political backers, wallowing in self-congratulation, and otherwise enjoying the pleasures of power.

However, he was much more than that. Like many others involved in making foreign policy—members of the notorious “Blob,” Ben Rhodes’s famous label for the self-righteous, well-insulated establishment—he constantly sacrificed American interests to win the favor of an unsavory mix of foreign agents, democratic hacks, clever manipulators, and brutal dictators. Unfortunately, he was an unusually effective warmonger. After the death of Sen. John McCain (R‑AZ) in 2018, Graham succeeded him as the informal leader of Washington’s notorious bipartisan war party, ever ready to send Americans overseas to fight wars for special interests and other nations.

Indeed, Graham was never happier than when plotting another crusade for Americans to fight. His bloodlust was on constant display. He was most ebullient when palling around with foreign leaders responsible for the deaths of thousands, or better yet, tens of thousands of foreigners, usually civilians. He almost cried tears of joy when President Donald Trump attacked Iran, rather than tears of sadness when Americans were killed in that unnecessary war. A onetime Air Force JAG officer who never came close to combat, he evidently craved service as a celebrated general or grand marshal, secure in America’s Imperial City while directing vast military campaigns and ordering devastating battlefield assaults.

His preferred home court was a press conference, any press conference, where he inflicted his aggressive nostrums upon the American people. He was as skillful at malicious manipulation as he was at self-promotion, acting as a “Trump whisperer,” filling the president with aggressive fantasies of achieving political greatness by bathing the world in death and destruction.

Perhaps only Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio more dramatically mutated from harsh critics to sycophants in the Trumpian policy universe. From his beginnings as a brutal Trump scourge, Graham smoothly shifted to permanent groveling—intentionally, knowingly, convincingly, shamelessly—once Trump took power. As Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times put it:

However, Graham’s militarism preceded his slavish flattery. Of course, Graham favored the disastrous decision to invade Iraq. “I fully understand why President Bush had to resort to the use of force to disarm Saddam Hussein,” he explained. “It has been readily apparent for many months that Saddam would not voluntarily part with his weapons of mass destruction.” Graham continued to stand by the war, based on a series of lies, despite the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, whose lives evidently meant nothing to him.

He backed endless conflict in Afghanistan, another unnecessary American military debacle, in which the Afghan people suffered the most, strongly opposing the Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan. Indeed, the conditions Graham set for peace would have required a permanent U.S. occupation. He declared in 2019, “Any Afghan peace agreement must allow a continued U.S. presence to protect our homeland, honor the rights of Afghan women, and uphold the current Afghan constitution.”

That is, after sacrificing so many young Americans to bring “democracy” to Central Asia, Graham wanted to turn even more of them into permanent colonial overseers. After President Joe Biden withdrew U.S. forces and the Afghan government collapsed, Graham urged Washington to revive the war, calling on the administration to recognize ousted officials “as the legitimate government representatives of Afghanistan” and “publicly support Congressional efforts to stand with our friends in the Panjshir Valley who will serve as a bulwark against regional terror.” For him, even two decades of purposeless killing was not enough.

He visited Libya, where he supped with dictator Moammar Gaddafi, discussing the possibility of providing aid to the longtime U.S. antagonist after he gave up his missile and nuclear programs. However, less than two years later, when civil war erupted, Graham seized his chance to fuel another endless war, enthusiastically pushing the U.S. to intervene and opposing any effort by Congress to exercise its constitutional responsibility to vote on the conflict. President Barack Obama “needs to step up his game with Libya but Congress should sort of shut up and not empower Gaddafi,” said the ever-belligerent solon.

The result? The cost in lives and wealth to America of the endless conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were obvious. Not so much in Libya. However, even there his militaristic passions ill-served America. The results were even worse for the Libyan people. Observed the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy:

Graham was an even more fervent advocate of aiding Israel, regardless of its conduct—even in its brutal occupation policy and forever war to establish regional hegemony, which have killed tens of thousands of civilians. For him, Palestinians evidently did not even count as human beings. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appreciated having a leading U.S. legislator, whom he called “a beloved friend,” as a predictably loyal shill.

Despite his pretense of supporting democracy and human rights abroad, Graham backed the Saudi leader MbS’s horrid war in Yemen, murderous aggression launched to turn that nation into a de facto royal colony. Graham resisted efforts to end U.S. arms sales to the kingdom. “We can’t ask our Middle East allies to fight harder and do more and not provide them with the weaponry to do it,” he said, calling Saudi Arabia, which helped underwrite Al Qaeda and was the home of 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers, “a valuable partner in the war on terror.”

MbS’s grotesque murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi turned Graham into a temporary critic, but he eventually reclaimed his membership in the MbS fan club. Yet earlier this year, Graham, ever the warrior wannabe, got angry when MbS refused to join Trump’s assault on Iran. The late lawmaker always put war first, anywhere and anytime. He joyously celebrated the resulting death and destruction.

In contrast to most of his militarist cheerleading, Graham’s backing for Ukraine, the victim of Russian aggression, at least had a moral component. However, he was a member of the malignant chorus that pushed Moscow to war, demanding Kiev’s inclusion in NATO. That understandably played badly in Russia. Just imagine how Graham and his congressional colleagues would have responded, with hysterical calls to initiate Armageddon, to a comparable Soviet campaign to bring Mexico into the Warsaw Pact.

Moreover, Graham’s enthusiasm for an active proxy war, in which Washington continues to help kill thousands of Russian soldiers, risked a confrontation with a nuclear-armed great power. Indeed, Moscow apparently is providing intelligence to Iran to help it target American military assets in the Mideast, something that even Trump admits is likely payback for U.S. policy in Ukraine.

However, Graham’s most malign role, in a career filled with foolish and callous calls for war, may have been pushing Trump’s ostentatiously reckless aggression against Tehran. “Graham had spent weeks arguing that war with Iran was not only justified but necessary, shuttling between Israel and the White House to help Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government press its argument for war,” reported Vivian Salama of The Atlantic. “Arab officials had repeatedly warned Graham of the perilous consequences war could unleash. Graham remained unmoved.” Alas, he always seemed to enjoy the carnage that his preferred policies generated, unmoved by the human cost.

Such a legacy. His last major foreign policy initiative was to push an illegal, immoral war of aggression. Some consequences: Americans killed, U.S. bases devastated, American wealth wasted, Gulf partners damaged, oil markets wrecked, and a shaken global economy. For all that trouble, Iran’s power over the energy trade has been enhanced and its need for nuclear weapons has been made plain. Heckuva job, Lindsey!

No doubt, Graham had some personal virtues, such as caring for his younger sister after their parents’ deaths. However, his role as a “public servant” was highly negative—an unending campaign to drag America into endless wars around the globe that served little more than his militaristic fantasies. Other members of the Blob, who share his determination to rule over nations and peoples everywhere, celebrated that role at his DC funeral yesterday.

However, while his passing is a personal tragedy, his departure from the halls of power should be welcomed. His death has made America and the world a safer place. Indeed, freed from Graham’s stream of malign and belligerent whispers, perhaps President Trump will return to his campaign commitment to put America first and end Washington’s string of reckless and endless wars.

But officials should also champion specific state legislative reforms that could keep Pennsylvania growing without compromising grid reliability or affordable electricity. By creating room for innovation in the electricity industry, Pennsylvania’s industrial powerhouse could be unleashed just as the rest of the grid gets tight.

Pennsylvanians are worried that the artificial intelligence boom will drive up electricity bills, and for good reason. Data centers accounted for an estimated 63% of the increase in electric capacity demand across the PJM Interconnection between 2025 and 2026, contributing to billions of dollars in additional costs across the region. PECO (formerly Philadelphia Electric Company) recently sought a 13% rate increase.

Federal regulators recognize the same challenge. “The status quo across much of the country is not good enough,” said Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Chairman Laura Swett. “Nowhere close.”

But retail bills are a state responsibility, as FERC also acknowledged. That means Pennsylvania cannot rely solely on federal reforms to ensure that new industrial customers pay their own way.

Voters understand the problem intuitively. If a new factory or data center requires major investments in electric infrastructure, ordinary households should not be forced to foot the bill. Some 81% of Pennsylvania voters support requiring technology companies to fund their own energy infrastructure needs.

Accordingly, Shapiro proposed the Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development (GRID) standards, which would encourage data center developers to generate their own power or pay for grid upgrades.

Yes, new loads should pay for the infrastructure they require rather than shifting the cost onto households. This is a good policy that the state’s Public Utility Commission has already adopted.

But Shapiro would bundle that sound principle with two problematic policies: an escalating energy portfolio mandate (similar to Pennsylvania’s Alternative Energy Portfolio Standards) and a discretionary certification that lets the state decide which projects qualify for privileged tax exemptions. This pairing awkwardly imposes a de-facto tax on most projects while freeing up tax exemptions for a favored few.

In any case, GRID reaches only customers who connect to the existing grid. Increasingly, major industrial projects are choosing a different path: building independent power systems outside the traditional utility framework and bypassing the grid entirely.

That trend points toward a reform that would entice the industrial customers who would rather not connect to the broader grid: light-touch regulation for customers who build or contract for electricity service through new independent power networks.

Call it consumer-regulated electricity (CRE). The principle is straightforward: If large customers would rather create or join a new electricity network than plug into the existing one, they should be free to do so without being subject to rules designed for public utilities. It’s a simple legislative change that would implement Shapiro’s pay-your-own-way policy.

Data centers are only part of the story. Because CRE would respond to the need for “speed to power,” large customers of all types, including advanced manufacturing facilities, would see Pennsylvania as a growth opportunity. Many industrial developers now face years of delays due to interconnection studies, transmission upgrades, utility-planning processes, and regulatory approvals. In some regions, obtaining grid service can take four to six years—or longer. New electricity networks offer a faster path to electricity service than the legacy grid can accommodate.

Just as important, CRE would open a market-based system built on voluntary exchange, not political privilege. Under the traditional utility model, complex regulatory proceedings or political dealings often decide who pays for new infrastructure or who is lucky enough to get service. These are areas where regulated utilities thrive, and no consumer can be quite as savvy. Instead, CRE would rely on private contracts among willing parties.

Finally, Pennsylvania families would benefit because new industrial projects would no longer rely on regulated utility infrastructure that socializes costs and risks to grid reliability across millions of customers. If a data center succeeds, private investors benefit. If it fails, private investors bear the loss. Either way, ordinary ratepayers will remain protected, and Pennsylvania’s growth won’t come at anyone’s expense.

Electricity-hungry industries should pay for the new power infrastructure they need. Allowing investors to set up their own power networks would guarantee consumer protection and offer a new path for industrial development.

Pennsylvanians don’t have to choose between prosperity and affordability; they can have both.

The unease lingering now around the Warsh Fed can be owed to something that the chairman hasn’t had enough time yet to address: The Fed still has no objective framework for setting its federal-funds rate target.

Some bumps in the road are unavoidable as Warsh attempts to reform an institution that is in serious need of fixing, and a departure from business as usual at the press conference was to be expected given Warsh’s strong opposition to providing forward guidance. He is correct to be skeptical of Fedspeak, at least in the way that it has existed since 2008.

Forward guidance became a way of committing the Fed to rate moves the data no longer supported and often provided signals that contradicted financial markets. In any case, the forecasts that once filled these meetings were frequently wrong, the years the Fed spent in the early 2020s insisting inflation would prove “transitory” being a stark example. But in the absence of forward guidance, there appeared on Wednesday to be a dearth of substance.

Warsh’s first news conference in June felt fuller, but only because he had news to deliver on the five new task forces to overhaul how the Fed operates. With that announcement spent and forward guidance gone by design, the only substantive thing the July presser could offer was a concrete framework for how the Federal Open Market Committee is making its rate decisions. That never surfaced, and not for reporters’ lack of trying. It never surfaced because no such framework exists.

The result is that we saw at the podium a Fed stuck in limbo—caught between a past Fed of excessive speechmaking and a positively reformed Fed that has yet to materialize. Without forward guidance, Warsh has no objective reaction function for setting rates, at least none that he is willing to publicly share.

There was a fascinating example of this at the presser. Warsh accurately observed that virtually all market rates had climbed significantly even though the Fed had not changed its target rate all year. While his reading of the data was correct, he inaccurately credited the omission of forward guidance as the reason markets were diverging from the Fed policy rate.

In fact, market rates decoupled from the fed-funds rate back in 2008, when the interbank lending market seized up and the Fed moved to a floor system awash in reserves. The same-month correlation between 30-year mortgage rates and the fed-funds rate, for example, has weakened drastically.

The Fed isn’t using this information to its advantage. Despite Warsh rightly believing that markets set prices far better than the Fed, he declined to vote for a interest-rate hike to bring the Fed’s policy stance more in line with markets. These are the cracks that appear when Fed members fail to provide a clear framework for their policy decisions.

It isn’t just Warsh who lacks a clear, objective interest rate framework. The hawks on the rate-setting committee don’t supply one either. The three dissenters who voted to raise rates this week could charitably be viewed as a disciplined alternative—a thoughtful bloc taking inflation seriously. But their record says otherwise.

In March, not a single Fed policymaker, including the three dissenters, projected a rate increase for the year. In fact, the median projection made this spring by policymakers was a rate cut, even as inflation ran well above the Fed’s 2% target. By June, the projections had swung toward a hike, and now three officials want to hike at once. All of this, despite no significant change to core inflation, which is just as elevated now as it has been all year. (Material inflationary pressures like tariffs, the Iran war, and the federal government’s unsustainable spending have remained broadly the same for months, too.)

The truth is that the FOMC isn’t relying on an objective rate framework, which explains the confusion.

Fortunately, the FOMC can fix this problem by adopting a clear rules-based monetary policy approach that will help indicate to the public where rates will move, and the committee doesn’t have to wait for the task forces to finish their work to do it. Everything Warsh says he wants—a Fed that talks less, that tracks economic conditions the way markets already do, that isn’t the center of every financial conversation—describes an explicit policy rule. Adopting one for the FOMC as a whole, or asking each member to provide their own, can turn these news conferences into useful sources of information and debate rather than a monthslong waiting game for task forces.

Warsh’s restraint on guidance isn’t itself the issue. But it has exposed deeper structural cracks at the central bank. In the absence of a clear framework, continue to expect more bumps in the road.

But Trump, irresponsible as he has been, did not create this problem. Congress did. For more than half a century, Congress has delegated broad tariff powers to the president with few limitations. If the president has run wild, it’s only because lawmakers took away the guardrails.

The Senate is preparing to hand the White House yet another tariff authority. The Russia sanctions bill championed by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R‑South Carolina) before his death earlier this month would authorize duties as high as 100 percent on the five largest importers of Russian crude oil and natural gas by volume. China would qualify, but so could Japan, India, France and Belgium. The tariffs would also apply to the top five facilitators of sanctions evasion. The legislation has been endorsed by Trump.

Whether Washington should squeeze the countries indirectly bankrolling Russia’s war against Ukraine is a question best left to national security experts. Congress ought to be asking a narrower question: What happens when this president has open-ended tariff discretion? The answer isn’t pretty. Since 2018, Trump has declared the importation of the following products a national emergency, a threat to national security or both: upholstered furniture, kitchen cabinets, bathroom vanities, dishwashers and auto parts. Now Trump is threatening Canada with tariffs in response to wildfire smoke.

The Supreme Court ruled in February that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act confers no tariff authority on the president. Within days of the decision, the White House pivoted to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 — an obsolete law intended to address an inflexible global financial system of another era — and reimposed a 10 percent global tariff. The U.S. Court of International Trade invalidated the Section 122 tariffs in May, and the tariffs expired last week. So, the administration made sweeping allegations of forced labor in 60 countries to justify replacement levies under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.

The Russia bill is riddled with the same ambiguity the president has exploited in these other laws. The tariff authority expires in five years, but what happens to the tariffs imposed under the bill? The legislation does not say. What data determines which countries rank among the five largest importers of Russian fuel? The bill does not specify that, either — a real problem, since Russian energy moves through murky intermediaries, and rankings shift depending on which numbers are consulted.

Tariff exemptions for allies are also not automatic. Countries can avoid the duties if they have taken “significant steps” to reduce their imports of Russian natural gas, but only the U.S. trade representative decides whether a country has met that threshold. Trump could direct the trade representative to set the tariff rate at 100 percent for one buyer of Russian energy and zero for another. That unchecked authority gives Trump leverage in disputes unrelated to Ukraine. With trade negotiations between the United States and India underway, the Trump administration could wield the threat of tariffs in discussions over farm exports, digital taxes or drug prices.

Members of Congress unmoved by the erosion of their Article I powers should at least consider their own self-interest. Trump’s tariffs are unpopular at home and have provoked retaliatory levies abroad that have punished American farms, factories and small businesses. Elected officials have refused to curb the administration’s tariff authority and have offered little assistance to their struggling constituents. That isn’t a ticket to winning reelection.

There are more responsible ways to draft this bill. Congress could add an expiration date to the tariff authority or require a vote before any duties take effect. Lawmakers could cap the tariff rate far below 100 percent or specify how the largest importers of Russian energy are determined. But the cleanest solution is to impose sanctions without giving Trump another tariff power to abuse.

One way is growth of gross domestic product.

Another is economic productivity. But there’s a less conventional measure worth watching:

Do the world’s most talented and ambitious people want to immigrate here?

Throughout most of America’s history, the answer has been an emphatic yes.

Scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists and strivers from around the world have chosen the United States because they believed they could build something, discover something or start a business while making a better life in this country.

We should worry about the day when this is no longer true.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration seems determined to make that day arrive sooner rather than later. Its destructive embrace of protectionism is not merely directed against foreign goods and capital.

It’s not limited to low-skill immigrants, either.

It’s also directed against in-demand foreign talent.

For instance, a rule finalized in early July replaces “duration of status” for foreign students, exchange visitors and foreign journalists with fixed admission periods.

In other words, it forces international students to seek government approval to stay beyond four years, regardless of whether their studies can be completed that quickly.

It also makes it more difficult for international graduates of American universities to stay and work after graduation through the Optional Practical Training program.

A recent brief by Amy Nice, Michael Clemens and Jeremy Neufeld of the Peterson Institute for International Economics highlights the stakes.

The authors examine the pipeline through which international students — particularly those studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics — enter American universities and eventually the American workforce.

It is an enormously valuable pipeline for all of us.

The authors found that America’s science and technology workforce depends heavily on talent from abroad.

Immigrants fill almost one in three advanced STEM positions and nearly one in two requiring a doctorate.

People who first entered the country to study represent about one-fifth of degree-holding STEM workers and more than one-third at the Ph.D. level.

Clemens explains that the STEM students who stay in the U.S. after graduation “patent new inventions at four times the rate of typical college graduates and are responsible for around 10 percent of all new inventions patented in the United States.

“They found high-growth startup companies at six times the rate of US-born graduates.”

That means we can dispense with the idea that if a foreign engineer gets a job, an American engineer must have lost one.

Protectionism applied to human capital relies on the same economic fallacy that underlies other forms of protectionism: the belief that the economy is like one pie, and hence, allowing foreign interests to take a seat hurts those already at the table.

Economies don’t work that way.

Talented people don’t merely fill existing jobs. They create them by inventing products, starting companies, conducting research and making the people around them more productive.

In the process, they create opportunities for other people that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

Giving a cold shoulder to foreign students is particularly absurd when you consider Washington’s obsession with competing against China.

Politicians insist that America is engaged in an existential technological race.

They spend billions of dollars subsidizing semiconductors and other favored industries.

They develop elaborate industrial policies intended to make America dominant in artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing and advanced manufacturing.

Then, when a potentially brilliant young scientist from India, China or anywhere else earns an advanced degree at an American university and wants to stay and contribute to the American economy, our government says perhaps they should leave.

You can throw billions of taxpayer dollars at a semiconductor factory in Arizona.

You cannot manufacture genius through an appropriations bill.

The Peterson researchers estimate that discouraging just one-third of international STEM graduates could leave the American economy 0.7% to 1.3% smaller, or roughly $200 billion to $400 billion in GDP over a decade — equivalent to losing the entire economy of Utah or South Carolina.

Those estimates necessarily depend on assumptions about future immigration and productivity, but we don’t need to know the precise numbers to understand the effect. When productive people leave — or never arrive — we lose their ideas, businesses, discoveries and all the related economic activity.

There is also something deeper at stake. One of America’s greatest strengths is that people vote for this country with their feet.

They leave familiar places, sometimes traveling thousands of miles, because of possibilities unavailable elsewhere.

It’s an extraordinary vote of confidence in American institutions: our markets, rule of law and culture of entrepreneurship.

We should never take it for granted.

Indeed, the possibility that the world’s brightest young people will decide that America is no longer worth the trouble should terrify us. Not simply because we will lose their economic contributions, but because their decision will tell us something about what America has become.

Not only that, but after almost two weeks of escalating, deal-breaking US-Iran hostilities (and spiking global energy prices), both sides abruptly stopped fighting Friday night – only to restart the fighting after surprise Iranian attacks Tuesday night.

And these were just the actions. Trump’s words – threats of tariff retaliation for European digital regulation, Canadian wildfire smoke, and tainted Mexican lettuce; a volatile Saudi nuclear deal; big threats for Iran and the Houthis – added to the drama.

To Trump and his defenders, this chaos is leverage. Per the “madman theory,” the unpredictability and impulsiveness compel opponents to cave to the president’s demands without costly follow-through. To some Wall Street traders, the uncertainty means big bucks – hence why they’re willing to pay for faster access to Trump’s social media feed and enjoying record profits. To the American economy, however, the chaos is a hidden tax, delaying corporate decisions on hiring, investment, purchases, and more – and the bill runs into the many tens of billions of dollars.

Start with tariffs. Measures of trade policy uncertainty, or TPU, are the highest in their 60-year history, more than 10 times the pre-2025 average. A review of Trump’s first term tariffs from economists Dario Caldara, Matteo Iacoviello and colleagues found that the jump in TPU during that period shaved 1% to 2% off US business investment within a year, equating to a $23 billion to $47 billion loss in 2018 alone. Applying this framework to the 2025 shock would mean that heightened trade uncertainty cost almost $100 billion in foregone US investment since January of last year.

Extrapolating from a single model is perilous, but independent estimates land in the same ballpark as my own back-of-napkin math. Oxford Economics reckons that tariff-fueled policy uncertainty erased $74 billion in US business investment last year – a drag masked by the AI-buildout boom. The Joint Economic Committee projected that sustained tariff uncertainty would cut manufacturing investment by more than $122 billion per year through 2029.

Although the investment numbers vary, the downward direction is the same.

The Iran war adds to the tab. Caldara and Iacoviello’s companion research on geopolitical risk finds the same linkage as their trade work: Spiking risk drives persistent declines in investment, employment and equity prices due to both the threat and realization of adverse events. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston expanded on this connection last year, finding that even perceptions of heightened geopolitical risk can result in significant and persistent reductions in corporate spending, particularly for cash-constrained firms.

We don’t yet have hard numbers on the Iran war’s depressive effect on overall private investment, but it’s likely been significant. The May 2026 update to the BlackRock Investment Institute’s geopolitical risk dashboard showed a historic spike in April, owed to the threat of regional war and the “most significant energy crisis since the 1970s.” Oil prices, meanwhile, track the chaos in real time: Brent crude spiked to almost $120 per barrel this spring, fell below $70 when the ceasefire began in early summer, pushed back above $100 last week, dropped as low as $81.63 on Monday, and surged to as high as $85.57 Wednesday morning. With the Iran war affecting not just oil but a range of goods and services on which multinationals depend, the turmoil will show up in the economic data over time.

Other Trump chaos arrives through non-policy channels but can impose similar economic costs. Consider a new paper from a quartet of economists on the public firing of Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer last August. After isolating for the effects of the termination, they found that it caused economic policy uncertainty to increase 9% in a single week, suggesting that the episode – and the related erosion of public confidence in BLS independence – “may have reduced GDP by roughly $20 billion.” The economists further caution that this estimate may be conservative, given that so many public and private entities depend on BLS data for employment, sales, pricing and other decisions.

Altogether, the turmoil likely helps to explain why the economy’s performance has been middling despite a generational AI tailwind, significant income and corporate tax cuts, and a more business-friendly regulatory environment. Hiring, factory construction spending, and non-AI investment have been tepid, and both CEO surveys and corporate earnings calls routinely cite uncertainty as a major headwind. According to the National Association of Manufacturers, trade-related uncertainty had been members’ top challenge since Trump took office – finally edged out last quarter by Iran-related worries about raw materials’ costs. Kearney’s 2026 Reshoring Index found that most executives last year favored “reversible moves” such as inventory buildups over long-term investments in domestic production. The Economist recently estimated that the total “uncertainty drag” has cut annual GDP growth by 0.4 percentage point – equal to the hit from Trump’s tariffs and immigration restrictions combined.

Most of Trump’s chaotic moves have a superficial logic: leverage over Canada, pressure on Tehran, prodding multinationals to invest in the US. Yet this ignores the wider, unseen costs of a governing philosophy that treats uncertainty as an objective – jobs unfilled, projects shelved, contracts unsigned, research unfunded, and plenty more — all because decisionmakers have no clue what Washington might do next.

The president revels in the chaos because he doesn’t pay for it. The rest of us do, and the bill grows by the day.

Exclusionary zoning involves restrictions on land use that constrain the amount and type of housing that can be built in particular areas. Most notably, some 70 percent of all residential property in the United States is zoned for single-family residences only. This, combined with other restrictions like minimum lot sizes and parking mandates, makes it difficult or impossible to build new housing in response to demand in many areas, particularly those that are most attractive for people seeking job and educational opportunities.

In a 2024 Texas Law Review article and a shorter version in The Atlantic, Joshua Braver and I explained why most exclusionary zoning violates the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which requires payment of “just compensation” whenever the government takes private property. The basic idea is simple: The property right protected by the Takings Clause includes the right to use property, and the right to use is severely constrained by zoning restrictions that block housing construction. We showed that both originalism and leading versions of living constitutionalism — two traditionally opposed approaches to constitutional theory — lead to the same conclusion.

While we hope federal courts eventually adopt this position, it could take a long time. In a recently posted article, “The State Constitutional Case Against Exclusionary Zoning, ” currently under submission to law journals, Braver and I build on our 2024 publications, and explain how great progress can be achieved by using state constitutional law. This can be done both by litigation under existing state constitutional provisions and through potential constitutional amendments.

Braver is a progressive living constitutionalist; I am a libertarian and an originalist. Despite ideological and jurisprudential differences, we are united on this important issue, and we hope others might join us.

Improving Existing State Constitutional Doctrine

Our new article is the first comprehensive assessment of where each state’s constitutional law currently stands on the issue of exclusionary zoning, and what can be done to improve things. All 50 state constitutions have takings clauses similar to that of the Fifth Amendment. The current precedent on most of them is highly permissive, imposing few takings constraints on exclusionary zoning. Much of it seems to be based on near-blind imitation of badly flawed federal Takings Clause precedent. Only Alaska, Connecticut, and New Hampshire have takings standards that are meaningfully less deferential to zoning than the notoriously lax standards applied by the U.S. Supreme Court under its decisions in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Company (1926) and Penn Central Transportation Company v. New York City (1978). The former upheld exclusionary zoning against constitutional challenge, while the latter established a standard for “regulatory takings” claims that subjects them to a three-factor test that is usually applied in ways that are highly deferential to the government.

Several states — most notably New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania — constrain exclusionary zoning under the state constitutional due process clauses. Courts in these states generally apply variants of New Jersey’s famous Mount Laurel line of cases. While these doctrines impose some meaningful constraints on zoning, they require courts to apply complex, policy-oriented balancing tests intended to assess a community’s “fair share” of affordable housing, and whether current zoning rules fall short of it. A few other states use different due process tests with at least a modicum of bite.

The overall landscape, then, is far from ideal. There is plenty of room for improvement, justified under both originalist and living constitutionalist approaches to interpretation. Many state constitutional takings clauses could be effectively reinterpreted by applying many of the same points we have developed in our article about the federal Takings Clause.

Numerous state takings clauses were initially enacted or reenacted during the period from 1865 to 1900, at a time when the right to use property was widely understood to be an element of the property rights protected by takings clauses. Others have their origins in the immediate pre-Civil War era, or at the time of the founding, when the right to use also enjoyed wide acceptance, promoted by such influential figures as the British jurist William Blackstone, whose work heavily influenced the founding generation, and James Madison, principal drafter of the federal Takings Clause.

From a living Constitution point of view, stronger judicial scrutiny of exclusionary zoning is justified by theories focusing on enhancing autonomy and opportunity, and on providing “representation-reinforcement” — protecting people who cannot effectively protect themselves in the political process. Exclusionary zoning victimizes minorities, the poor, and — most obviously — those who lack representation in the localities adopting zoning policies because those very policies prevent them from being able to move there.

While takings clauses are generally the best path to curbing exclusionary zoning, we also offer strategies for improving state due process zoning jurisprudence. The New Jersey approach and others like it can be modified to have stronger bright-line rules constraining exclusionary zoning, as opposed to difficult-to-use balancing tests. The former would simultaneously provide more protection for property owners and people seeking housing and require much less in the way of discretionary policy-like decisions by courts.

Reform Through State Constitutional Amendment

We also outline ways in which zoning reform can be achieved through state constitutional amendments. The federal Constitution is notoriously difficult to amend. Most state constitutions are much more easily changed. Seventeen states allow amendment by a simple majority vote in a citizen-initiated referendum. In 10 others, it can be done by a vote of the state legislature, followed by a popular vote.

Public opinion research on zoning reform finds equivocal results. Much depends on the wording of questions. But the evidence indicates that strong majorities support ending most exclusionary zoning if it is presented to them as a way of lowering housing prices and allowing property owners to build what they want on their own land. Moreover, voters are unlikely to pay close attention to the specific details of referendum initiatives. This creates potential opportunities to enact sweeping reforms by constitutional amendment.

We propose several possible options for doing so. The best and most obvious is a simple categorical ban on exclusionary zoning, with strictly limited exceptions for situations where housing construction poses a serious threat to public health or safety. But we also outline more moderate alternatives, such as just banning the more egregious and widespread types of exclusion, such as single-family-only zoning.

In recent years, some states — most notably California, Montana, and Texas — have enacted significant zoning reform through the ordinary legislative process. In different ways, these laws all make it possible to build new multi-family housing in areas where it was previously difficult or impossible to do so. But serious constraints remain even there, and in many key states little or nothing has been accomplished, such as in New York and Virginia. “NIMBY” (not in my backyard) interest groups are often able to stifle or severely constrain reform at the state and local level.

Experience with eminent-domain reform shows that property rights reforms enacted by citizen-initiated referendum are likely to be much stronger than those that must go through a state legislature. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s controversial 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London, which upheld the condemnation of homes for private “economic development, ” there was an immense political backlash, leading 45 states to enact reform laws. But many of the reforms turned out be ineffective, primarily because interest groups that benefited from broad eminent domain authority were able to water them down in the legislative process, creating the appearance of change without the substance. Reforms enacted by citizen-initiated referenda were almost always effective, by contrast, because they were drafted by property rights advocates who could bypass the state legislature and go directly to voters. And, significantly, most such reforms passed by large margins. Zoning reformers would do well to learn from this experience.

• • •

Jurists ranging from liberal Supreme Court Justice William Brennan to prominent conservative Judge Jeffrey Sutton have argued that states often can and should use their constitutions to protect rights more broadly than the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the federal Constitution. Combatting exclusionary zoning is an area where this can be done.

Moreover, state constitutional law avoids common objections often raised against federal judicial intervention. Relative to federal constitutional law, the state version can take more account of local and regional variation — and be enforced by judges who face greater political accountability because many do not have life tenure.

Ultimately, state constitutional litigation and state constitutional amendment should be used in conjunction with conventional political efforts at zoning reform. Efforts to reform federal takings doctrine through litigation should also continue. Past successful constitutional reform efforts — including on civil rights, same-sex marriage, gun rights, and eminent domain issues — all used a combination of strategies. Zoning reformers should follow the same multifaceted path to success.

Higher Education Is Heavily Skewed to the Left
The source of many of the problems in higher education is the political imbalance among professors, with those of a leftist orientation far outnumbering those on the right. Researchers have documented this imbalance by surveying faculty, examining voter registration data, and comparing political donations.

Nathan Honeycutt recently pieced together various surveys revealing the political orientation of faculty over the past several decades. His key figure is reproduced below.

The mid-1980s marked the last time the political imbalance was both small and declining. The next four decades saw a steady increase in the share of faculty on the left and a steady decline for those on the right. By the early 2020s, for every professor on the right, there were 6.9 professors on the left. Even when restricting the range to the years covered by the same survey—UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute survey from 1989 to 2017—the left’s share of faculty increased by 14.6 percentage points (from 45.2 percent to 59.8 percent) while the right’s share of faculty decreased by 4 percentage points (from 16.1 percent to 12.1 percent).

Analyses of voter registration are less frequent and cover fewer colleges, focusing disproportionately on top colleges. These snapshots tend to indicate that the political imbalance among faculty is even more extreme at top colleges. For example, Mitchell Langbert, Anthony Quain, and Daniel Klein compared voter registration among faculty in five fields at 40 top universities. They found registration data for more than 7,000 professors, of which 50 percent were registered as Democrats, and 4.3 percent were registered as Republicans, meaning that for every Republican professor, there were 11.5 Democratic professors. Some fields were more skewed than others. Economics and law were the least skewed, with Democrats outnumbering Republicans by 4.5 to one, and 8.6 to one, respectively. History was the most skewed, with 33.5 Democrats for every Republican.

Political donations also provide snapshots of political imbalance. Data from Open Secrets reveal that for the 2024 election cycle, faculty and staff at the 20 universities that donated the most to political campaigns favored Democrats and liberal groups. For every dollar that was donated to Republicans or conservative groups, 28 dollars were given to Democrats or liberal groups. This means that 97 percent of political donations went to Democrats or liberal groups.

The bottom line is that whether examining faculty surveys, voter registrations, or political donations, higher education is heavily skewed toward the left.

Causes of Imbalance: Self-Selection, Unconscious Bias, Discrimination, and Loyalty Oaths
A political imbalance is not necessarily a problem. In some fields, such as physics or engineering, an imbalance would not be cause for concern because there is little opportunity for political bias to affect teaching or research in those fields. But fields in the social sciences and humanities offer ample opportunity for political bias to distort teaching and research.

Nor are all causes of an imbalance the result of nefarious actions. Natural causes of imbalance could be if those who lean left are smarter or more interested in becoming professors than those who lean right. Differences in intelligence can be ruled out as a cause: Joe Duarte and colleagues review studies of intelligence and political orientation and conclude that the evidence is “incompatible with the hypothesis that” faculty “are overwhelmingly left-liberal because liberals are smarter than conservatives.”

But different interests leading to self-selection are a different story. Among first-year undergraduate students in 2004, 26 percent of left-leaning students indicated an interest in earning a PhD, a figure that was only 15 percent for right-leaning college students. But left-leaning students also outnumber right-leaning students: 29.5 percent of students were on the left, 24.1 percent were on the right. Thus, 7.7 percent of students were both on the left and interested in graduate school, while only 3.6 percent of students were on the right and interested in graduate school. If this ratio persists into faculty positions, it implies a natural imbalance of left- to right-leaning faculty of around 2.1 to one.

But how does a natural imbalance of 2.1 to one become the 6.9 to one, or 11.5 to one, imbalance of today? The most plausible reason is that the initial imbalance is unstable and unleashes forces that serve to exacerbate the initial imbalance.

The first force that is unleashed is unconscious bias. When people encounter research that aligns with their own values and views, they tend to accept it at face value, without looking too hard for reasons to be skeptical. But when people encounter research that does not align with their views, they are much more skeptical, looking for flaws in the data, methodology, or interpretation. Since no research is perfect, it is usually possible to find some flaws. As philosophy professor Michael Huemer explains,

Because of the initial imbalance, conservative scholars and findings face more scrutiny than liberal scholars and findings simply because there are more peers that are skeptical of the research and hunting for flaws. Since no department wants to hire faculty who conduct flawed research, and conservative researchers and research will be scrutinized more thoroughly, conservatives are less likely to be hired, exacerbating the initial political imbalance.

Discrimination is the next factor magnifying the imbalance among faculty. Even if similar proportions of faculty on the left and right are willing to discriminate against their ideological opponents, the initial imbalance among faculty means that conservative applicants are much more likely to face a hiring committee that discriminates against them, which, in turn, magnifies the existing imbalance.

In fact, once a field or department is sufficiently lopsided, faculty stop even trying to hide their discrimination. For example, in the field of social psychology, which has a 14-to-one Democrat-to-Republican ratio, 82 percent of liberal social psychologists “admitted that they would be at least a little bit prejudiced against a conservative candidate” when hiring for a faculty job. Looking across academia, “22% of academics admitted they would discriminate against a known Trump supporter” when hiring faculty.

The third force exacerbating the initial political imbalance is political loyalty oaths. The prime example of this is required diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements for those applying for faculty jobs. As Abigail Thompson wrote about these statements: “To score well, candidates must subscribe to a particular political ideology … these DEI rubrics act as a filter for those with nonconforming views.”

DEI statements are made even worse when used by administrators who have veto power over which applicants can be considered. Consider a case at the University of California–Berkeley in which

The use of DEI statements is widespread, but not universal. Scholars James Paul and Robert Maranto document that 19 percent of faculty job listings in 2020 included a DEI statement, with 34 percent of listings at elite colleges requiring statements. In the past several years, some states have outlawed the use of DEI statements, but many other states still allow their usage.

There is likely a natural political imbalance among faculty based on different interests and the resulting self-selection, but this imbalance is then magnified by unconscious bias, overt discrimination, and loyalty oaths, which all serve to dramatically increase the political imbalance.

The Goal Is Competitive Coexistence
While the left’s dominance of higher education is bad, there are a few points to keep in mind.

First, the left’s domination within higher education is a problem not only because it is leftist but also because it is dominant. When one side dominates, only truths that conform with that political ideology will be acknowledged. Inconvenient truths will be ignored, dismissed, or explained away. As Eric Kauffman noted, “certain questions are never asked, or certain answers are off-limits.” If the right dominated higher education, there would still be inconvenient truths, albeit different ones.

Second, to avoid dominance of either side, toleration of the opposing political tribe is essential. In the current context, this mostly means that universities should tolerate conservatives, but it also means that those trying to reform universities should tolerate their ideological opponents. As I’ve argued previously,

Third, clashing ideologies is a good thing. Indeed, some argue that scientific progress requires ideological conflict. For example, Joseph Schumpeter argued that

But as Schumpeter hinted, the individual biases of scholars don’t operate in a vacuum, but are met with different biases from different scholars. As Karl Popper explains, this clash tends toward scientific objectivity. But the objective does “not (and cannot) result from the attempts of an individual scientist to be ‘objective’, but from the co-operation of many scientists,” each with their own biases finding weaknesses and flaws in their opponents’ arguments. As weak arguments and evidence are discredited and discarded, and replaced with stronger arguments and evidence, science moves closer to the truth.

Accounting for these points, the end goal we should strive for is to acknowledge that scholars will have ideologies and biases, and that these may even be necessary and useful for scientific progress, but to keep a balance of power to prevent any one ideology from dominating and purging the others. The best way to describe this goal is the phrase competitive coexistence.

Fortunately, examples exist of competitive coexistence applied in the educational context to help guide us. As Robert Maranto and Michael Mills document,

Higher Education Hasn’t Fixed Itself (and Probably Can’t)
The political imbalance among faculty leads to a host of problems that reduce the faculty’s ability to find and disseminate the truth. Keith Whittington argues that the “public service to be provided by the universities required their independence from politics. Universities that are ideologically or politically captured or that are obliged to propagandize on behalf of favored political, economic, or religious interests can perform neither the research nor the educational interests of society at large.” Duarte and colleagues provide a short overview of problems, including increased groupthink and confirmation bias, nonrepresentative topic selection, and misinterpretation of findings.

To their credit, many academics realize there is a problem. But this group then splits into two camps.

The first camp advocates internal reform, meaning that universities should fix themselves without outside interference. Examples include Heterodox Academy (HxA), whose president, John Tomasi, wrote: “For nearly a decade, HxA has been the voice for internal reform,” as well as experimental psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker, who helped to establish a Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. The internal reform camp agrees that changes are needed, but argues that they need to be driven internally by the university itself, as outside interference will not work and will lead to other problems.

The other camp notes that internal reform has failed so far, with little reason to expect it to work. A few examples are:

William A. Jacobson: “We are beyond the point when academia can reform itself. There is no internal opposition left. Dissenting voices have been purged not just by so-called ‘cancel culture’ but also by a hiring process that excludes not only conservatives, but also anyone who does not express and adhere to leftist DEI dogma. If academia is to be saved from its downward spiral, it will be by reforms imposed from the outside.”

Stanley Kurtz: “If Pinker’s relatively small Academic Freedom Council alone were in charge of selecting new faculty, I might believe that a change could come from strictly internal forces. Yet trusting the much larger left-dominated faculty that has purged conservatives and consolidated its monopoly for decades is folly. Pinker can float his suggestions for achieving intellectual diversity. The faculty will ignore them.”

Bryan Caplan: “Why would they reform? … This is what they actually believe, and they have a super majority, and they keep getting taxpayer money to do what they want.”

Dorian Abbot: “I am confident that internal reform will not achieve the goals … at most universities.”

Omar Sultan Haque: “Universities tend not to be self-correcting ecosystems … universities tend to protect and reward their own insiders for maintaining things as they are; and insiders are, ironically, the very people who are supposed to be responsible for change! That is a conflict of interest; it isn’t a reform recipe consistent with human nature … internal reform efforts, while noble, have as an empirical matter largely failed to produce meaningful structural change over the last decade.” [emphasis in the original].

The internal reformers have not been able to notch many victories. Indeed, the professoriate is even more imbalanced today than when the internal reformers began their efforts to combat it. It is therefore unlikely that internal reform will work in the future.

The ICEHE Solution
If the goal is competitive coexistence, how can a university achieve it? The best solution is to establish a new cross-disciplinary center that essentially functions as a dissident university within the existing university. There are five key characteristics—independence, competition for students, equitable financing, hiring freedom, and an even playing field (ICEHE)—to ensure that the new center is successful in bringing new voices to campus.

Independence. Independence from the existing university is essential. If a new center is needed, then, by definition, the existing faculty and administrators are either unable to reform or are actively hostile to the notion that they should. Either way, allowing existing faculty or administrators to control and oversee the center will ensure failure, with any resources devoted to the new center being diverted to benefit the entrenched status quo. To have any hope of success, the new center needs to be independent from as much of the existing university as possible. While a new center cannot avoid reporting to the provost and president, if it is housed under an existing dean, that is a huge red flag.

Competition for Students. The existence of a center will not mean much if there is no way for the center to attract students. This is a glaring problem with many existing centers across the country—students can engage with the center but have little academic reason to do so. Occasionally, a center will offer a minor or even a major, but unless students are already drawn to those topics, the center is basically invisible to most students at the university. From the university’s perspective, the center mostly acts as a quarantine camp for dissident faculty and students and as a shield against charges of a politicized campus. For example, when Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield considered taking a job offer from another university, his department chair told him: “you mustn’t go. You’re our balance.” Needless to say, a department is not balanced if a single departure would leave roughly half the country without a voice on the faculty.

In contrast, leftist activists have been extremely successful in getting their courses added to the required curriculum or smuggling their political agendas into existing required courses. To counteract this one-sidedness, the new center should be authorized to offer any required course, including both general education requirements and required courses for majors. This will allow the center to offer competing courses when the existing university’s offerings have become politically skewed. For example, most universities require English 101–type courses. But at many colleges, these are some of the most politically biased classes on campus, offering politically one-sided reading lists and assignments. Because the course is required, many students unwillingly end up in courses that are geared more towards indoctrination than education. When the new center can offer competing versions of the class, students will no longer be forced to take biased classes to graduate.

Equitable Financing. The new center should be financed in the same way as the rest of the university. On too many campuses, additional financial burdens are placed on dissident centers, either in the form of having to pay for university services while other groups do not, or in the form of having to raise their own philanthropic funding when others do not.

If other centers and departments are financed based on student enrollment, then the new center should be, too. This would have the added advantage of allowing student enrollments to drive the relative size of different centers and departments on campus, rather than relying on a politicized process or plan.

Hiring Freedom. One of the most consistently stressed points among reformers concerns faculty hiring. As Eric Kaufmann writes, “It is vital that these centres [sic] control tenure lines … with full independence from the rest of the university.”

The reason this feature gets so much attention is that faculty hiring by universities is atypical and a particular threat to those seeking to change the status quo. At almost all universities, existing faculty decide who to hire as new faculty. There is really no viable alternative, since faculty are the only ones who can determine the qualifications and scholarly contributions of applicants. But that does not mean the practice is not without problems. Of particular relevance, there is the tendency of existing faculty to essentially self-clone themselves when hiring. This self-cloning can take a variety of forms, including non-ideological ones like preferred research practices, but also ideological ones, like political orientation. Thus, faculty hiring faculty is both unavoidable and a cause of problems. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, letting current faculty choose new faculty is probably the worst way of choosing new faculty—except for all the others that have been tried.

Because faculty will tend to self-clone, it will therefore be hard for a university to address a political imbalance. For example, 60 percent of history and journalism departments at top universities have zero Republicans. It is delusional to expect such departments to recognize the need for more balance, or to faithfully pursue balance even if they do.

But if obstructionist faculty can be excluded, the faculty hiring process can be used to protect the new center, as well. The key to long-term success is to identify a critical mass of scholars who want to see the new center succeed and give them complete control over further faculty hiring in the new center. If there are not enough existing faculty at a particular college, then outside scholars from other campuses should sit on hiring committees until a critical mass is reached. This will not only exploit the center’s tendency to self-clone but will also protect the center from the rest of the faculty’s efforts to sabotage or hijack the center.

Even Playing Field. For competitive coexistence to work, the playing field needs to be even. If the new center is forced to overcome obstacles that the rest of the university does not, then the competitive pressure is thwarted. Examples of an uneven playing field could be disproportionate class scheduling during unpopular time slots, different rules for research or media engagement for the center than for the rest of the university, and even the admissions office screening out students that might be interested in the center. Efforts like these that seek to sabotage the center need to be monitored and remedied if competitive coexistence will work.

Conclusion
The political imbalance among faculty is large and getting worse. Faculty on the left outnumber faculty on the right by 6.9 to one across the academy, and by 11.5 to one at top colleges. Different interests and self-selection can explain only a small share of this imbalance, with unconscious bias, discrimination, and political loyalty oaths explaining most of it.

Reform is needed, but internal reform is likely a lost cause. Faculty who saw no problem with political loyalty oaths clearly do not see the political imbalance among their peers as a problem and cannot be trusted to reverse it. But most externally imposed reform does not hold much promise, either. The key to successful reform, therefore, is to essentially exploit the existing faculty selection process to create a dissident university within the existing university. The ICEHE method identifies five key markers that increase the likelihood of success: independence, competition for students, equitable funding, hiring freedom, and an even playing field. This method is the most likely path to competitive coexistence, which is necessary to restore and maintain a functioning higher education system.

NCTE cites years of declining participation, fiscal instability, and governance problems, all noted in the CCCC’s own 2024 Executive Committee meeting minutes. Those failures did not arise from an intellectual void; CCCC’s demise was substantially self-inflicted. An academic organization cannot narrow its mission, alienate dissenters, drift away from teachers’ practical needs, and then treat its loss of participation as an inexplicable bad luck.

Colleagues accused me of upholding white supremacy and suffering from a kind of “Stockholm Syndrome,” as though a Black professor dissenting from the approved racial doctrine must have internalized his oppressor. The insult revealed the field’s governing logic. It would be one thing if I had been ostracized for mistreating students or falsifying research. But I was punished for refusing a prescribed racial role. A field that advertised itself as committed to marginalized voices treated a Black scholar’s independent judgment as pathology. Was the hypocrisy lost on them, or was I just not a real Black person? As it turned out, it was the latter. Eventually, I left my professorship and, effectively, the discipline.

CCCC was supposed to be concerned primarily with how people write, argue, persuade, deliberate, and communicate. That work should be indispensable in a pluralistic civil society, especially when that society is experiencing significant polarization. Free speech provides the right to speak; rhetorical education provides the skills to do it well. This helps us coexist with people whose consciences lead them elsewhere. Yet rhetoric and composition seems to have flipped the script. Instead of asking how people who disagree can reason together, more and more the field asked how language could advance a particular and increasingly illiberal conception of justice. The first mission requires argument and openness to revision. The second can reduce scholarship to activism and disagreement to moral impurity.

CCCC’s own priorities make the drift difficult to deny. Its 2027 convention call foregrounded justice-oriented design, systemic oppression, racial retrenchment, anti-carceral practices, mutual aid, and decolonization. These are all worthwhile concepts to study. Yet, terms like “argument,” “persuasion,” “debate,” and “deliberation” did not appear. That is remarkable for the premier organization of a field bearing the name “rhetoric.” Those missing terms identify the civil practices through which free people manage disagreement. Arguments are supposed to require reasons, expose claims to objections, and compare possible actions, in a good-faith attempt to seek voluntary assent—a lofty but necessary goal. A field that neglects these practices may teach students to identify injustice within one approved framework, but not defend that framework to skeptics or revise it when evidence demands. Those things should be sine qua non in any academic field.

Now many members are trying to build a self-contained successor organization. This is not necessarily a bad thing; independence could permit a more inclusive renewal. That said, it could also remove the remaining external checks on a field already prone to ideological conformity. That is where a cult-like discipline could become something closer to a bona fide cult.

A scholarly association is supposed to treat its standards as contestable, and revisable. A cult establishes a sacred vocabulary, grants insiders authority to define purity, treats dissent as moral contamination, and makes exclusion proof of virtue. If the same people who cultivated CCCC’s insularity now build an institution in which they, alone, make the rules, may produce an insular bubble full of people incapable of hearing criticism because they have defined criticism, itself, as violence.

So, if you are still wondering where I stand on this issue, I believe CCCC deserves its reckoning. (Some claim that NCTE feared pressure from the Trump Administration after an anti-Israel communication associated with CCCC, but neither NCTE nor any federal agency has publicly confirmed that account.)

Generally. I want to be clear that not every member deserves professional displacement. I also know that losing a professional home can be painful. But institutions are accountable for the purposes they abandon and the people they drive away. I was one of them.

CCCC did not merely suffer from a changing academic landscape. It helped create the conditions of its own demise!

The conflict was recently brought home to America with China’s arrest of Min Zin, an American citizen who heads the Institute for Strategy and Policy (ISP)–Myanmar, located in Thailand. Beijing accused him of spying.

China has increasingly close relations with the government in Naypyidaw, highlighted by the June visit to Beijing of Min Aung Hlaing, the commanding general who recently anointed himself Myanmar’s president. China helps Hlaing’s regime survive despite widespread popular opposition.

For decades the borderlands of Myanmar have been aflame, as ethnic minorities fought for the autonomy promised them when the country gained independence after World War II. The Tatmadaw, or military, seized power in 1962 and has ruled the country in varying iterations ever since. In 2021, Hlaing, disappointed by the hybrid civilian-led government’s refusal to make him president, staged a coup, ending Burma’s brief experiment in limited democratic governance.

In response to widespread protests, the regime “instituted curfews and other limitations on gatherings to curb the demonstrations. Doubling down, the military launched violent campaigns across the country, targeting resistance villages, and silencing and torturing dissenters, displacing thousands in the process,” according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

The junta detained tens of thousands of its citizens as the nation quickly returned to civil war, this time across almost the entire country. Most of Burma now lies beyond the Tatmadaw’s control; the regime is secure only in major cities.

The result is a humanitarian horror. Reports the New York Times: “Far from the spotlight fixed on Iran, Ukraine, Lebanon and other global conflicts, Myanmar, a Southeast Asian nation of about 50 million people, has quietly collapsed.” Tens of thousands have died. Hundreds of thousands have fled the country. Millions have been uprooted. Reports the European Commission: “Mass displacement continues at an alarming rate, with some 3.6 million people displaced as of December 2025, about 90% of whom have been displaced since February 2021.”

The conflict is religious as well. Nearly a decade ago, the military, backed by the civilian authorities, launched a brutal campaign against the largely Muslim Rohingya. As the United Nations’ refugee agency explained, “armed attacks, massive scale violence, and serious human rights violations forced thousands of Rohingya to flee their homes in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. Many walked for days through jungles and undertook dangerous sea journeys across the Bay of Bengal to reach safety in Bangladesh,” where roughly a million remain.

Many of the ethnic insurgents — especially the Kachin, Chin, and Karen, as well as smaller shares of the Lahu, Lisu, and Naga — are Christian. Against them the Tatmadaw has promoted Buddhism. Reported the Baltimore Council on Foreign Affairs: “Stated-owned newspapers and television channels report daily about Senior General Min Aung Hlaing and his inner circle making donations to monks, or building monasteries and images of the Buddha.” The regime has demonized religious minorities. According to Georgetown University’s Berkley Center: “the military planted and perpetuated the ideology that to be nationalist is to be Buddhist. … The military successfully used the polarizing ‘us vs. them’ rhetoric in portraying non-Buddhists as threats to the state and in capitalizing Buddhists as protectors of the Burmese race and effective guardians of Buddhism.”

I made my first trip to Karen-held territory more than a quarter century ago and have returned several times since. The region bordering Thailand was long ravaged by conflict, with many Burmese pushed across the border into refugee camps. A tenuous peace was established through a 2012 ceasefire, only to end after the latest coup.

Washington has sanctioned the Tatmadaw and its junta, but Southeast Asia worries little about the nature of ruling regimes. Most important, neither India nor China, competing for influence in Myanmar, is squeamish about working with murderous regimes. Both hosted Hlaing in June, with enhanced economic and security cooperation on the agenda. Analyst Jason Towers noted that Chinese leader “Xi Jinping’s frequent meetings and interactions with Min Aung Hlaing since the [2024] Myanmar earthquake send a strong signal that China is supporting his regime at the highest level.” Beijing has pressed insurgents in border territories to end attacks on the regime and the Tatmadaw to safeguard Burma’s natural gas and oil pipelines.

China is the regime’s principal weapons supplier and has blocked proposals for a United Nations arms embargo. Beijing has played a particularly important role in empowering Burma’s air force, which, according to the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar, “has increasingly deployed airstrikes on populated areas, targeting crowded markets, schools, places of worship, camps for internally displaced persons, and hospitals.”

Beijing’s support may have prevented the Tatmadaw’s defeat, but the regime is still unlikely to prevail. It is estimated to control only about one-fifth of the country, half the share held by opposition forces, with the rest of the land contested. According to a Council on Foreign Relations analysis: “The People’s Defense Force (PDF) and its allies continue gaining key territory, pushing the military on the defensive in the Bamar heartland and advancing towards Mandalay. The military junta especially struggles to fight ethnic armed organizations across the country, which have made most of the territorial gains so far.”

Washington’s ability to influence the junta is limited. Economy-wide sanctions targeting the energy industry would injure Burma’s people more than the junta and probably would not crash the regime, given Chinese backing. Washington should do what it can to weaken the Tatmadaw, but that requires cooperating with European governments and especially Burma’s neighbors.

That won’t be easy, since China will remain the most influential foreign actor. The administration should engage Beijing on the issue, seeking to reduce its aid to Naypyidaw. Washington could offer a modus vivendi of sorts, indicating that its primary concern is humanitarian. Thus, Washington could promise to forgo any efforts to court a Burmese government resulting from changed Chinese policy.

An international reform effort led by Xi could better serve Chinese as well as international interests. The Tatmadaw’s ostentatious brutality and corruption ensure continuing conflict, while Beijing’s ability to positively influence events is limited. Cornell University’s Aung Thura Ko Ko observed: “Myanmar is not a chessboard Beijing can fully control. … The greatest long-term risk for China may be anti-China sentiment, which has long existed in Myanmar.”

In contrast, a push for regime change or at least reform, returning basic control to the Burmese people, could better protect Chinese interests. Defusing the conflict would reduce concerns over the security of energy supplies. Ending perceived Chinese support for the junta would relieve popular hostility toward Beijing. Indeed, the civilian regime overthrown by Hlaing had established good relations with its dominant neighbor, and China has maintained contact with opposition forces.

The conflict in Myanmar rarely makes the top of the news in any Western nation. However, it remains one of the world’s worst humanitarian horrors, which President Donald Trump should address. Obviously, Myanmar, under military rule for more than six decades, is a tough case. However, China, despite its official hospitality for Hlaing, should recognize that most of its contacts with Myanmar are about problems, many of them violent. Even for China, a more democratic peace might be a better option than continued unpredictable civil war.

There is a simple answer, and Kentucky law currently forbids it: let large consumers build their own grid.

Data centers have been clear they are willing to finance, build, and operate their own generation—just look at President Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge. Generally, it is good public policy to get out of the way of progress if it avoids harming others, and an islanded system imposes no costs on other ratepayers, adds no strain to the regional grid, and cannot shift a dollar of stranded infrastructure onto a family in Lexington or a factory in Bowling Green, because it never touches their wires.

We call this Consumer-Regulated Electricity (CRE), and it rests on three conditions: the system must be electrically islanded from the existing regulated grid, serve only sophisticated customers who voluntarily contract for service, and obey all the other environmental and safety laws already on the books.

The premise of a Public Service Commission is that ordinary consumers need protections from utilities acting as natural monopolies—these grids are inherently not natural monopolies, and these consumers are multi-billion-dollar companies. Letting these large consumers trade bureaucratic protection for speed-to-market is a win for all electricity customers.

Currently, Kentucky law makes consumer-regulated electricity nearly impossible. Anyone generating and selling electricity to others risks becoming a “utility”—and with that label comes the obligation to obtain a certificate of public convenience and necessity before building anything, as well as a host of other regulations. Layered on top is the 1972 Certified Territory Act, which carved the Commonwealth into exclusive service territories and gave each incumbent supplier the sole right to serve customers within its boundaries. Companies wanting to build a private power system serving several willing industrial customers aren’t just trying to start a business: they’re initiating a lopsided turf war.

These statutes were not written in bad faith. Even today, most economists view the electrical grid as a natural monopoly. But this consensus goes back decades, to a time before the kind of demand generated by data centers could be fathomed.

The irony is that in many ways what we are advocating for is how the power grid began: large consumers and producers building wires. It wasn’t until later that residential customers and rural areas received service. For instance, the Tennessee Valley Authority grew from a single factory connected to a single power plant. Like modern day data centers, the 1883 Southern Exposition brought its own power plant to light up Louisville brighter than New York City.

The policy we are proposing has been tested in other states. Legislation in Ohio has allowed private grids to pop up in New Albany, the data center hub outside of Columbus. New Hampshire, Utah and West Virginia all have passed similar laws. Kentucky, competing for the same investment, still tells these projects to get in line.

The fix is modest. The General Assembly can exempt islanded systems serving new, nonresidential customers from the definition of a public utility and from the certified territory framework. Such systems would remain fully subject to environmental, safety, and building codes—everything except economic regulation that exists to police a monopoly these systems do not have.

CRE also keeps corporate energy politics off Kentucky’s grid. Many tech companies have made environmental pledges that Kentuckians never voted for. Under CRE, a company that wants to run on solar, battery storage, and small reactors can build exactly that without retiring a coal plant, lobbying for a renewable energy portfolio standard, or pressuring existing utilities.

This is also a future-proof policy. While data centers are the current concern, these policies are technology-neutral. Any large industrial consumer can take advantage of these grids, and any new technology can power them. Data centers powered by gas turbines today, nuclear-powered future tech manufacturing tomorrow.

Kentucky lawmakers have already shown they want data center investment and the resulting tax windfalls—now they’re working on how to protect ratepayers. The easiest way is also the simplest: let these companies build their own power, at their own risk, on their own dime.

Craig’s proposal is clever and a cut above more conventional defenses of court-packing. But I remain unpersuaded. His argument falls short in multiple ways. He overrates the negative aspects of the current Supreme Court majority and underrates their positive contributions, including on the very issue of combating incipient authoritarianism, the main focus of his concerns. He also overestimates the supposed inevitability of future court-packing and the feasibility of his compromise plan. Finally, there are good alternative fixes for many of the problems that (rightly) concern Craig.

Before going into detail on our differences, it’s worth noting some key points of agreement. Craig and I both agree that strong judicial review is a valuable institution, and that court-packing (at least if not combined with his term-limits proposal) is likely to lead to a spiraling retaliation that will destroy that institution. Once one party “packs” the court, the other will almost certainly retaliate in kind. The end result is likely to be a judiciary unwilling to meaningfully constrain the party in power. In an earlier Lawfare article criticizing court-packing, I explain how this spiral is likely to destroy judicial review at the lower court level, too.

We also agree that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has made some badly flawed decisions. But we differ somewhat on how bad they are and whether court-packing could “fix” them.

Rights and Wrongs of the Roberts Court

Craig’s advocacy of court-packing arises from his dissatisfaction with several major Roberts Court decisions, which he believes are both legally wrong and help Donald Trump’s bid for authoritarianism. In some cases, I agree these are bad decisions. But Craig does not give sufficient weight to the court’s many good decisions, especially those that serve as useful constraints on executive power and thereby also curb incipient authoritarianism.

Over the last 18 months, the Supreme Court has played a key role in thwarting several major Trump power grabs. The most recent example is the birthright citizenship case, which prevented him from stripping citizen status from hundreds of thousands of children of undocumented migrants and temporary visa holders, thereby subjecting them to potential deportation.

In Learning Resources v. Trump (which I helped litigate), the court struck down Trump’s attempt to use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose the highest tariff schedule since the Hoover-era Smoot-Hawley tariffs that notoriously exacerbated the Great Depression. Trump’s tariffs would have imposed some $1.7 trillion of new taxes on Americans. The court’s reasoning was not limited to the specifics of IEEPA. All six justices in the majority made clear that they rejected the notion that the president could have a virtually unlimited power to impose tariffs. Thus, the precedent is likely to help block his efforts to twist other statutes into authorization for unconstrained presidential tariff authority, as in the case of his recently imposed Section 301 tariffs (which are now being challenged in court).

In lesser-known cases, the court blocked Trump’s effort to use the National Guard against blue states (thereby causing him to abandon the effort) and twice used brief “shadow docket” decisions to block deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and signal that courts could review Trump’s invocation of that law (though without resolving the issue of whether he was right to do so).

Liberal Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan is no fan of much of the conservative majority’s jurisprudence. But, in a recent speech, she rejected the charge that they just “rubber stamp what the current administration does.” The truth is “quite the opposite,” she said. “I think that that is a bad rap.” To back up her point, she cited several recent cases, including the tariff case, the National Guard case, and more. She emphasized that “[t]ariffs is probably the key policy issue for this president … something he campaigned on … he cared an enormous amount about. … I don’t think that there are all that many decisions in the recent times, where a court strikes down such an important policy to a sitting president.” She’s not wrong.

The court’s earlier rulings in “anti-commandeering” and Spending Clause cases have played an important role in protecting “sanctuary cities” against Trump’s efforts to force them to aid in his cruel mass deportation policies. In both his first and second terms, these decisions—mostly written and supported by conservative justices—have been repeatedly cited by lower-court judges as crucial precedents curbing Trump’s power to directly coerce state and local governments and to pull federal grants from them. Lack of state and local support significantly constrains deportation efforts.

The Roberts Court is also probably the most speech-protective Supreme Court majority in all of American history. Most notably, it has issued a series of decisions prioritizing freedom of political speech over campaign finance restrictions (although, I understand, many of my progressive friends are less enthused by it), governments’ ability to indirectly pressure speakers, and impose restrictions on social media. When it comes to the latter issue, the court’s ruling came in a case involving two red states’ efforts to restrict social media moderation.

If we are worried about incipient authoritarianism, it is particularly important to prevent the state from being able to use speech restrictions to suppress opposition. I believe the Roberts Court’s pro-speech decisions are justified even aside from this danger. But in an environment where a descent into authoritarianism is a real threat, we may need to bar even some speech restrictions that might be justified in other situations, including, in this case, campaign finance regulations that many on the left believe the government should be able to impose. If you let Trump and his supporters in Congress wield broad authority over campaign finance, they are likely to use it to target political opponents.

Finally, the court’s growing use of the “major questions” and nondelegation doctrines—both of which make it difficult for the president to claim sweeping delegations of authority—are also a valuable barrier to potential executive authoritarianism. The “major questions” doctrine requires Congress to “speak clearly” when authorizing the executive to make “decisions of vast economic and political significance.” It makes it difficult for the president to use vague statutes to make massive power grabs, as Trump tried to do with tariffs. The nondelegation doctrine imposes constitutional limits on how much power Congress can delegate to the president, even when it is clear in doing so. Both can be used to counter both left- and right-wing power grabs. We saw this in the tariff case, where three conservative justices relied extensively on major questions in their ruling against Trump.

Craig acknowledges these second-term defeats are real yet insists that they are just “a floor.” But protecting people from massive power grabs that gravely endangered the liberty and well-being of millions is no small matter. The same goes for blocking executive use of the military to suppress domestic opposition. And, in each of these cases, the Trump administration had at least minimally plausible arguments for their positions, sometimes backed by prominent conservative legal scholars and commentators. A court inclined to give Trump and the GOP whatever they want could easily have gone the other way on some or all of them. Even if the court could and should have done more to constrain Trump, these rulings are crucial safeguards for liberty and democracy.

Still, it is true that the conservative majority has issued some very bad rulings. I agree with Craig that Trump v. United States—the 2024 presidential immunity ruling—is one of them. But that decision does not give the president blanket immunity from all criminal prosecution for actions taken while in office or even categorical immunity for all “official acts.” It’s a bad decision but not one that totally eliminates criminal prosecution as a check on presidential abuses of power.

The same is true of Trump v. Slaughter, the ruling giving the president the power to remove administrative agency heads previously protected from removal by statute, except “for cause.” I myself have serious reservations about “unitary executive” theory, especially in the modern context of greatly increased federal power. But there is a highly plausible, even if debatable, textualist and originalist case for the result in Slaughter. Moreover, it is not clear how broadly Slaughter will apply, given the court’s simultaneous decision in Trump v. Cook, holding that the president does not have the power to dismiss members of the Federal Reserve Board without cause.

The reasoning used to protect the Fed against presidential removal power is difficult to reconcile with Slaughter, but might well also protect at least some other agencies. In my Lawfare article, I make similar points about Louisiana v. Callais (another case emphasized by Craig). It, too, has its flaws, but is not as bad as critics claim. Its ruling against deliberate use of racial discrimination to create majority-minority districts is generally sound, though it is also flawed insofar as it makes it too easy for Republican states to engage in their own racial gerrymandering.

In my view, the Roberts Court has made several decisions that are worse than any of the above. Most notable are Trump v. Hawaii, the awful 2018 anti-Muslim “travel ban” case, and the similar recent decision in Mullin v. Doe, the Haitian TPS case. In both of these cases, the court’s conservative justices turned a blind eye to blatantly unconstitutional discrimination in the immigration context (one case based on religion, in the other on race). This is part of the court’s broader pattern of indefensible double standards when it comes to immigration restrictions.

But these cases, and others like them, are situations where the court should have blocked a government action but chose not to. Destroying judicial review through court-packing would make that situation worse, not better. It would eliminate all or most situations where courts constrain ruling-party abuses of power. And it would make such constraint impossible in the future, as well. Currently, a future court might overrule or limit cases like Trump v. Hawaii. But there is no such hope if we destroy judicial review.

A packed court would not only refrain from constraining executive abuses itself—but, more crucially, would also prevent lower courts from doing so. As I have previously noted, the Roberts Court’s reversal of rulings against Trump in a few high-profile “shadow docket” rulings has obscured a much larger body of thousands of cases where the lower courts constrained Trump without any interference.

I’ve focused on legal issues related to Trump’s power-grabs and abuses. Obviously, the Roberts Court has also issued important decisions on other issues. It is not possible to cover all of them here. In my view, the good on these other fronts outweighs the bad, though the latter certainly isn’t absent. Others will weight things differently. But, even if you think the court’s record on these other issues is bad, it is essential to ask whether it justifies destroying judicial review. That question is especially relevant if you think the court’s errors are mainly ones where it gave the political branches of government too much leeway (as with its reversal of Roe v. Wade).

Political Dynamics and Craig’s Proposed Compromise

Craig hopes that the dangers of court-packing can be mitigated by his compromise proposal, under which court-packing would be combined with a provision reversing it if Congress and the states enact a constitutional amendment imposing Supreme Court term limits. The threat of continued Democratic court-packing would, he argues, incentivize Republicans to support the term-limits amendment.

I support Supreme Court term limits, and would be happy to see such an amendment enacted. But Craig’s compromise plan is unlikely to work. Should Democrats enact a court-packing plan, it seems unlikely they would then just give away the advantages thereby achieved. In the long run, those gains are likely to be largely wiped out by Republican retaliation. But politicians often have short-term orientation and discount long-term dangers. For their part, Republicans might reject the plan, especially if—as is likely—it is strongly opposed by the party’s base.

It is important to remember that a constitutional amendment requires massive supermajorities—two-thirds of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of state legislatures. Even a modest degree of opposition by either the left or the right could easily block enactment.

Perhaps Craig’s plan would still be the best alternative if the only other option is conventional court-packing. Craig suggests as much in parts of his article. But court-packing is not in fact inevitable. To make it happen, either the Democrats would need to have very large congressional majorities, or they would need near-total unity among themselves on the issue, assuming—as is likely—they have only modest-size majorities. Neither of these is a given.

Polls show that court-packing is far from popular. Recent surveys indicate either an even split on the subject or substantial plurality opposition (43–33% in a recent YouGov poll). Moreover, these survey questions all ask about “expansion” of the number of justices without giving any reason why. The policy might therefore seem to some respondents like a politically neutral “good government” measure. Political science experiments indicate that introducing the notion that expansion is intended to change the partisan ideological balance on the court greatly reduces support. Any real-world attempt at court-packing will almost certainly feature widespread ideological appeals of this type. The fear of destroying judicial independence is what killed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1937 court-packing plan, even at a time when Democrats had massive congressional majorities and FDR himself was far more popular than any president is likely to be under current conditions.

Maybe things will be different when and if Democrats return to power after the 2028 elections. But, at least for now, we should not give up hope of stopping court-packing by opposing it.

That hope is buoyed by the reality that there are better ways to address many of the flaws of recent Supreme Court decisions. In my Lawfare article, I explain how Callais’s key shortcomings can be offset by legislation banning gerrymandering. Unjust and discriminatory immigration policies can be mitigated by making legal migration easier and abolishing ICE (perhaps by reducing opposition by adopting my proposal to give its funds to real cops). A Democratic Congress with a large enough majority to enact court-packing could easily adopt these other measures instead. Politically, all of these would be far more feasible—with far less danger of going awry—than Craig’s proposal requiring constitutional amendment.

In sum, court-packing is a cure worse than the disease. And there are lots of superior alternatives.

Those records illuminate two very different cases.

My own experience illustrates the first case. In 2019, I filed a Privacy Act request asking the NSA whether it possessed records mentioning me. Years earlier, while serving as a congressional staffer, I had worked to help free an American constituent detained by Ethiopian authorities and communicated extensively with U.S. officials in East Africa. I wanted to know whether those communications had ever found their way into NSA databases – and specifically the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Section 702 database, which sweeps up vast quantities of digital data on Americans even when the actual targets are foreign persons or entities.

The agency refused even to acknowledge whether any records existed, claiming that doing so would set a dangerous precedent. If the NSA confirmed or denied records for one requester, it argued, that would allow “a terrorist or other adversary to file a FOIA request with us in order to determine whether he or she was under surveillance or had evaded it.”It was an absurd, but typical, NSA response to a FOIA request.

In August 2025, documents uncovered during separate FOIA litigation revealed that an NSA public affairs official had attempted to spur a criminal investigation of me over an article I wrote criticizing intelligence whistleblower protection policy. After I submitted another Privacy Act request seeking records related to that episode, the agency again refused to produce them. Only after I filed suit earlier this year did the NSA release emails it had previously claimed it could neither confirm nor deny existed.

In contrast, when then-Fox News Channel host and commentator Tucker Carlson alleged in June 2021 that an unidentified alleged government whistleblower had told him NSA was “monitoring” his communications as part of a plan to “take him off the air,” the agency responded within 24 hours on X that it had never “targeted” Carlson.

Then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy called for an investigation of NSA, which was subsequently initiated by the NSA Inspector General, not exactly an entirely independent oversight body. That report was not made public, prompting yet another Cato FOIA lawsuit that just last month finally produced the heavily redacted NSA IG investigation report.

The NSA IG backed up NSA’s claim that Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target, a real but carefully cabined assertion: we never pointed our collection apparatus at him as its object, the report claimed in effect. It says nothing about whether his incidentally collected communications are in the Section 702 or other NSA databases.

So, here is the question no NSA official has ever had to answer publicly: if acknowledging whether a person has intelligence records is so dangerous that it could aid adversaries, why was the agency able to state within 24 hours that Tucker Carlson he had never been an agency “target”? The agency’s explanation for these two disclosures cannot simply be that one was safe and the other was not. It must explain what principle distinguishes them.

Both cannot be true. Either the national security rationale is false—a doctrine of convenience deployed against ordinary requesters and dropped the instant a famous man makes an agency’s silence politically expensive – or it is real, in which case NSA breached it, in public, for a cable host, and owes the rest of us an explanation for the double standard.

In the age of government mass digital surveillance, neither NSA nor any of its partners should be allowed to get away with these kinds of disclosure games. Changing the law to end this sort of selective disclosure would be a great way to end it.

These concerns, of course, are valid. Yet focusing only on the DOJ’s partisan misuse misses another important problem: the Department cares more about political theater than enforcing the law. Much of its dysfunction arises from that fact.

Take a look at the record. Under Attorney General Pam Bondi, the DOJ used its powers of investigation and prosecution as a populist gimmick, driven by popular grievances against the administration’s perceived enemies, from Harvard to the NFL. Real reform means more than just stopping the DOJ’s attacks on the left. It means resisting the Department’s misuse for populist ends. Senate should demand that throughout the confirmation process.

Since returning to office, President Trump has decided there’s virtually no popular complaint that can’t be fixed with a federal inquiry or indictment, and DOJ has gladly obliged. Universities, long the subject of conservative frustration, were one of the first groups to meet the brunt of the new DOJ. The Department swept in to demand that schools “screen out [foreign] students who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values.” In 2025 alone, the government extractedover $400 million in settlements from just four universities.

Other DOJ targets have done nothing more than follow the laws of economic reality. While Trump’s one-page “Great Healthcare Plan” has failed to spur legislative action for lower prices, he has directed the attorney general to go after drug companies for unspecified “anti-competitive practices.”

As Trump’s “Liberation Day” trade war drove up prices for food and fertilizer, he ordered DOJ to create a special “Food Supply Chain Security Task Force” and start prosecuting any agricultural businesses engaging in “criminal collusion.” Of course, going after American farmers could conflict with populism, so Trump highlighted his special concern about “foreign-controlled companies.”

It is true that medicine and food are essential and, certainly, too expensive. This owes more to ham-handed government interventions than shadowy industry conspiracies, though at least the priority is rightly placed. But under Trump and AG Bondi, the DOJ has taken on populist crusades over far lesser matters. The president quickly prioritized DOJ going after Ticketmaster. “America’s live concert and entertainment industry is the envy of the world,” an executive order breathlessly declared, but “it has become blighted by unscrupulous middlemen.” Whatever merit antitrust enforcement may have here, it is overshadowed by the president making his own show of calling in the federal prosecutors to protect the Swifties rather than letting career prosecutors decide what merits their attention.

A year later, another pillar of mass entertainment needed “urgent national action,” even in the absence of congressional action. Trump sent in AG Bondi to the defense of college football and basketball, supposedly under existential threat from changes concerning “pay-for-play” and eligibility rules. Again, an executive order from the White House, rather than the judgment of seasoned lawyers, decided what merited a DOJ inquiry.

This spring, the president quarterbacked yet another DOJ campaign concerning sports. Perhaps still smarting over his failed attempt to buy an NFL franchise 40 years ago, and bolstered by populist anger dating back to Colin Kaepernick’s national-anthem protests, DOJ just launched a new investigation into the league’s livestreaming deals.

Americans deserve a Justice Department that prosecutes crimes instead of chasing headlines. Every hour spent investigating whichever industry or institution has become the administration’s latest political target is an hour not spent on the Department’s core responsibilities. So the Senate will have a choice: Does it want a DOJ that acts with the restraint expected in a constitutional republic—or one that is chasing the next standing ovation?

As we’ve discussed, the issue of forced labor is real and complicated. Walk Free, a human rights group that tracks it, estimates that as of 2023 roughly 28 million people were in some form of forced labor worldwide, and the International Labor Organization puts about 5.5 million in tradable-goods industries. Even free marketers like me readily admit that trade in goods made by forced labor isn’t really “trade”—voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange—at all.

In the current Section 301 case, however, “forced labor” is nothing more than legal cover. As Rick Woldenberg, CEO of Learning Resources and a lead plaintiff in one of the Supreme Court tariff cases, wrote when the investigation was launched, the case looked like a “sham” from the start because “the decision to impose these taxes has already been made.”

What the Trump administration eventually produced has sadly proven Woldenberg right.

The findings were clearly predetermined. The methodology is thin to the point of embarrassment. The remedy is both ridiculously blunt and wildly out of proportion to any measurable economic distortion. The action gives targeted countries no way to get the tariffs lifted by eliminating their supposedly bad behavior. And the whole thing establishes precedent for an “automatic tariff generator” that Trump or a future president can deploy at will. It makes a mockery of a real issue and might poison legitimate reform. And Congress probably won’t do anything about it.

Background.

After the Supreme Court invalidated the administration’s “emergency” IEEPA tariffs in February, the White House scrambled for a replacement. It reached first for Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a rarely used balance-of-payments provision, to slap a flat 10 percent tariff on goods from nearly every trading partner. Those tariffs are legally and economically dubious, a lower court has already knocked them down (the case is on appeal), and by design they expire 150 days after imposition—a deadline that arrives tomorrow.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has suggested the administration might simply announce another “balance of payments crisis”—and another round of Section 122 tariffs—when the current ones end Friday, but that raises even bigger legal problems than the current taxes have. Thus, eventually, Section 301 will take over. The only question is when. (Don’t you just love policy uncertainty! Sigh.)

Unlike Section 122, Section 301 requires an actual investigation, public notice and comment, and a formal report before the executive branch can act. Under the statute, the U.S. trade representative may respond to foreign “acts, policies, and practices” that are “unreasonable or discriminatory” and that “burden or restrict” U.S. commerce, with “unreasonable” acts being those that are “unfair or inequitable.” As I wrote in a 2022 paper, this is dangerously broad and ambiguous language that’s ripe for abuse—abuse the Trump administration is now undertaking in the forced labor case.

Yes, it’s a reverse-engineered sham.

In June, Greer’s office closed its investigation, finding that 54 economies had failed to impose any prohibition on imports made with forced labor and that six more had failed to enforce the laws they had on the books. The agency recommended tariffs of 12.5 percent on goods from 46 of the lawless (ha) economies and 10 percent on goods from 14 more (the six with allegedly inadequate enforcement and eight more that had pledged to implement prohibitions under their Trump trade deals). Collectively, the targeted countries constitute nearly everything the United States imports.

USTR’s stated justification is that these economies’ failure “to impose and effectively enforce a forced labor import prohibition” is “unreasonable” and a burden on U.S. commerce, “by subjecting U.S. producers to unfair competition from forced labor goods both in export markets and the U.S. market, and by displacing foreign goods produced without forced labor or forced labor inputs into the United States and other markets.”

Strong words. There are several reasons to doubt that USTR really means any of it.

The administration said the tariffs were coming before the investigation ended.

Under Section 301, USTR is supposed to investigate first, decide later, and—if all else fails—impose countermeasures to push a foreign government to fix its burdensome or “unfair” trade practice. One can argue about whether a given case’s findings and recommendations are correct, but we can all agree that—as plainly stated in the law itself—the conclusions aren’t supposed to be written in advance.

Here, by the administration’s own admission, they were.

Long before the forced-labor investigation closed, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent repeatedly said the tariff revenue would be “back in place at the previous level” by the time the Section 122 duties lapsed this month, and administration officials have described the Section 301 push as a way to recover the revenue lost when the Supreme Court struck down IEEPA. Trump himself said much the same right after the court issued its ruling, noting that, along with Section 122, “We are doing the various investigations necessary to put fair tariffs—or tariffs, period—on other countries.” A few weeks later, USTR Greer confirmed the timeline, saying he hoped to conclude the investigations “before the 10 percent tariffs imposed by President Trump in February under Section 122 expire in July.”

When the president, the treasury secretary, and the United States trade representative all confidently promise that a case will produce a certain result before it’s finished, the “investigation” part is a formality—boxes to be checked for legal cover and nothing more.

The forced-labor report is remarkably thin.

The report itself reinforces this conclusion. For a document meant to justify tariffs on more than $1 trillion of trade with 60 countries (including several close U.S. allies), the report is nearly devoid of evidence. For example, USTR offers essentially no proof that the targeted countries actually export goods made with forced labor. In most cases, the report simply notes that a country lacks an express ban on goods made from forced labor and then simply assumes certain “forced-labor goods” are getting through. The entire country-specific assessment totals just 31 pages—around half a page per country—and much of that is just the same empty passages copy-pasted dozens of times. And USTR even admits that foreign governments and private companies “may perform forced labor due diligence” and protect against trade in forced labor without an express legal requirement to do so. Its only retort is that “some” might not—hardly ironclad evidence of wide-scale wrongdoing and harm.

The agency also offers no proof or analysis of its central assertions that forced labor creates “unfair export competitiveness,” or that forced-labor goods undercut U.S. producers (and thus meet the law’s requirements for remedying a supposed “burden” or “restriction” on U.S. commerce). In reality, a firm that uses forced labor might sell at market prices and pocket any savings from using low- or no-wage labor. In the largest recent U.S. forced-labor prosecution, in fact, the Georgia “Blooming Onion” case, the alleged offenders—some in the U.S. and some in Latin America—did this very thing, netting more than $200 million by paying trafficked farmworkers pennies but selling produce at ordinary prices. The beneficiary was the trafficker, not American shoppers getting ultracheap groceries (at law-abiding competitors’ expense). In the Section 301 report, however, USTR simply assumes that the opposite occurs, harming American producers in the process.

There’s likewise no explanation for the blanket tariff rates assigned to targeted countries. Most egregiously, USTR gave the same 12.5 percent tariff rate to Angola, Libya, Russia, Venezuela, and Kazakhstan—developing countries that rank low on the Walk Free forced labor index (and have other issues!)—as it did to developed, “good actor” countries like Norway, Japan, Switzerland, and Australia. Why? USTR never says, nor does it explain its proposed reduced tariff rate for certain imports of apparel and textile products, which are among the most common manufactured goods linked to forced labor globally. (Spoiler: Ask the lobbyists.) Instead, the proposed tariffs just so happen to approximate the expiring Section 122 rates and the various “deals” the administration has struck over the past year. And they just so happen to include most of the same exemptions—for politically sensitive goods and for products already hit by other tariffs—that the IEEPA and Section 122 regimes contained.

I’m sure it’s all just a coincidence.

The United States is itself hardly a forced labor angel.

Meanwhile, findings that USTR does provide often run from questionable to absurd. Most notably, the United States isn’t exactly in a great position to lecture other countries about forced labor. Section 307 of the Tariff Act of 1930 has banned imports made with forced labor since 1930, but it was lightly enforced for more than 80 years due to a wide “consumptive demand” exception that allowed imports of goods not domestically produced “in such quantities as to meet U.S. consumption needs.” Congress narrowed this exception in 2022 to target goods made in Xinjiang, China (via the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act), but this change still wasn’t a global sourcing ban. Just as importantly, the Trump administration’s enforcement of Section 307 appears to be more lenient than it was under Joe Biden. According to a recent letter from Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, in fact, the U.S. Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force hasn’t added a single firm to the UFLPA “entity list” since January 2025, and U.S. Customs detained just $166 million in shipments under the UFLPA last year, down from roughly $1.76 billion in 2024 and $1.42 billion in 2023.

By Walk Free’s own index, moreover, the United States is actually worse on forced labor than almost half (26) of the countries on USTR’s tariff list. (Treat the EU bloc as a single economy, and America still lands in 19^th place.) Indeed, the U.S. is somewhat unique globally in that our Constitution contains an explicit carve-out for prison labor, which exists today across the country. As the Marshall Project just reported, “Incarcerated workers are responsible for producing over $2 billion in goods annually” and are typically paid less than a dollar per hour (or aren’t paid at all). A lot of this work is for government entities like schools and the DMV, but, as the Associated Press found in 2024, a good chunk of it ends up in private, open markets and even “in the supply chains of goods being shipped all over the world via multinational companies, including to countries that have been slapped with import bans by Washington in recent years for using prison and forced labor themselves.” The Trump administration, for its part, doesn’t seem too worried about any of these forced labor goods.

The tariff cure dramatically overshoots the forced labor disease.

Even assuming the targeted countries were truly at fault, the remedy proposed by the United States is orders of magnitude too big. As already noted, the U.S. government bans imports produced by forced labor, and these restrictions have—even during the tougher Biden years—targeted just a tiny share of all U.S. imports. Trump’s new tariffs, on the other hand, target trillions.

The UFLPA totals, of course, don’t capture the total extent of forced labor on U.S. commerce because some imports could (and surely do) slip through various cracks. But back-of-napkin estimates indicate that, while forced labor is a serious issue, its aggregate effects on the U.S. economy are microscopic compared with the tariffs being proposed.

Using Walk Free’s latest forced-labor estimates (from 2023), global manufacturing employment data from the International Labor Organization, and U.S. government import figures, we can approximate both forced labor’s share of the global manufacturing workforce and the amount of global goods trade that plausibly originates from forced labor. We found the overall share of forced labor in the manufacturing workforce of the 60 targeted economies to be 4.16 percent (17.8 million out of 426.9 million workers in all) and multiplied that by the $2.46 trillion in manufactured goods that the U.S. imported from these countries in 2023 (the last year of forced labor data). Even generously assuming that every forced laborer in a targeted country’s private sector works in manufacturing and that everything they make is either exported to the United States or competing with U.S. exports in other markets, that’d give us an absolute ceiling of just $102 billion in “tainted” goods out of the $3.05 trillion that entered the U.S. in 2023 (around 3 percent) and the $26 trillion in goods traded worldwide last year (0.4 percent).

This estimate is obviously an overshoot, and USTR’s own theory of harm is much narrower. Its report claims that the requisite injury to U.S. commerce is the competitive advantage that forced labor confers on goods made therefrom (i.e., the costs a firm avoids by not paying its workers market wages and complying with labor regs). If we assume that labor is around 15 to 25 percent of a firm’s total manufacturing cost, we can estimate that the “avoided-wage advantage” embedded in that $102 billion is between $15 billion and $26 billion. So, a tariff actually designed to offset that distortion, which is what Section 301 calls for and what USTR’s report describes, would work out to less than 1 percent (0.5 to 0.84 percent, for those keeping close score at home).

USTR wants 10–12.5 percent.

These are obviously just rough calculations with lots of assumptions, but other estimates reinforce the conclusion that the tariffs are way too big. Most notably, Peterson Institute economist William Cline applied a different model to estimate both the U.S. exports lost to unfair forced-labor competition in OECD markets and the direct cost of forced-labor goods entering the United States. His result—lower, as expected from a macro model measuring total trade distortion as well as the dilution of forced-labor inputs in the global value chain—suggests a warranted forced-labor tariff just 0.23 to 0.25 percent.

Just looking at tariff revenue gives us the same result. According to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, the Section 301 tariffs could raise around $97 billion annually over the next decade—an amount that dwarfs a “forced labor distortion” that’s measured in the low billions (or less).

Three different methods all give the same conclusion: This is Trump tariff replacement with a human-rights label glued on top.

There’s no off-ramp.

In response to these calculations, USTR might argue that forced labor is so odious that it warrants a deliberately punitive tariff to force international compliance, proportionality be damned. Yet, even leaving aside that this isn’t the theory USTR advanced (or what the law says), it’s flatly contradicted by the tariffs’ design. In particular, the proposed 301 action offers no compliance off-ramp for targeted countries and conspicuously skips several developing countries (e.g., Turkmenistan, Malawi, and Mauritania) that trade with the U.S. and have serious and documented forced-labor problems.

Section 301 directs USTR to target foreign practices that injure U.S. commerce and to achieve a change to or the removal of the offending policy (some history here). If these tariffs really were about eliminating forced labor, USTR would offer to completely remove the tariffs if targeted countries implemented new laws or demonstrated tighter enforcement. (Indeed, Canada, the European Union, and Mexico all maintain or are implementing forced-labor import bans, and the EU’s arguably reaches further than America’s.) Yet USTR offers no benchmarks that a country could meet to see the tariffs eliminated. A country could even adopt the United States’ exact forced-labor framework and still see its imports tariffed—because tariffs are the point.

Here’s how this is supposed to work.

Perhaps the best way to understand the forced labor tariffs’ emptiness is simply by comparing them to the Section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports that Trump imposed during his first term. Trump’s case against Chinese intellectual-property and industrial policy wasn’t without fault, but it still required an eight-month investigation and produced a nearly 200-page report on a single country. And the recommended tariffs—initially set at $50 billion to match/​offset the alleged harm from the targeted Chinese policies—came only after U.S.-China negotiations collapsed. (The tariffs then ratcheted up dramatically in response to Chinese retaliation.)

This time, USTR claims to have fully investigated 60 economies in just 82 days. Its 80-page report gave each country just a few empty paragraphs, and the agency went straight to disproportionately huge tariffs without any serious negotiations with the alleged offenders—tariffs it had promised in advance and that just so happen to mirror the regime the president has spent a year-plus trying (and failing) to keep in place.

Summing it all up.

The forced labor action is a clear abuse of the law and a serious departure from past U.S. government practice—even under President Trump. By no reasonable measure can it be considered anything other than a ham-fisted way to reinstall Trump’s tariff wall and protect it from another IEEPA-like defeat in federal court. In the latter case, the administration might be successful: Section 301 is more legally durable than the untested IEEPA and, while the forced labor action is obviously flimsy, a court might simply be unwilling to question the president’s determinations and actions. We shall see.

If the courts do rubber-stamp these tariffs, their problems will likely extend well beyond just this sham case. Section 301 could become a way for USTR to tariff any country, at any rate, and for any reason and duration, as long as it checks the law’s minor procedural boxes. The actual merits of the case, the quality of the agency’s findings, or its efforts to consider public input won’t really matter. Just say a country doesn’t adequately do something you say is harmful and then apply blanket tariffs after meaningless hearings and comments. Voila.

This is precisely the open-ended tariff power grab the courts checked with their IEEPA rulings, just with a little more procedural window-dressing. In such a case, Section 301 would be a broad tariff generator instead of the targeted tool Congress thought it designed, and it’ll surely be used by Trump or any future president who wants to tariff trading partners over carbon emissions, labor standards, AI regulation, or anything else. Republicans cheering the forced labor tariffs today should consider how they’ll feel when a Democrat holds the tariff pen.

Forced labor is a serious issue that deserves a serious policy. This ain’t it. And by dressing Trump’s tariff dreams in the language of human rights, the 301 action risks discrediting diplomatic, economic, and enforcement tools that might actually work and fueling political pushback in places that desperately need to improve. That’s a shame, and it’s surely not the last one we’ll endure before Trump’s gone. (There’s another Section 301 action—on excess capacity—reportedly coming soon.)

The only real question is, once again, whether enough people in Congress will ever care enough to do something about it.

Markets FTW

Independent distributors and lab-grown diamonds are killing off the very bad, often corrupt global diamond cartel: “De Beers is halting production at South Africa’s biggest diamond mine for at least two years due to collapsing prices, as the product goes for about half of what it did four years ago.”

Chart of the Week

Exploding farm subsidies (related):

Not good:

Creative destruction:

Last year, 36,640 Americans died in traffic crashes. That was the fewest since 2019, yet it still works out to more than 100 fatalities per day. The new generation of vehicles quietly accumulating mileage on our streets offers enormous promise to bring the number down even more and more each year.

Over at Marginal Revolution, economist Alex Tabarrok reminds us that as of March, Waymo’s driverless vehicles had logged more than 220 million miles across five of its areas of operation. Compared with human drivers on the same roads over the same period, and counting every crash regardless of fault, the Waymo Driver was involved in 94% fewer crashes causing serious or fatal injury. It also experienced 82% fewer airbag deployments and 93% fewer injury crashes involving pedestrians.

Waymo’s data cover only mapped city streets, and serious crashes are rare enough that the counts behind these percentages are small. But its analyses are peer-reviewed, the crash reports go to federal regulators, and no one has produced a competing dataset showing anything different.

So, who is working to slow this happy development? Tabarrok points to trial lawyers. The American Association for Justice has been lobbying against AV legislation for the better part of a decade. American auto insurance pays out somewhere between $180 billion and $220 billion each year, and litigating ordinary collisions is big business. (Tabarrok’s fix is an elegant one used in Britain since 2018: Insure the vehicle rather than the driver, pay the victim directly, and let the insurer recover from the manufacturer if the software erred.)

But lawyers turn out to be the junior partners here. Tech policy expert and executive director of Alliance for the Future Brian Chau looked at the paper trail and found that labor unions account for 78% of the entities opposing AVs in various forms, 54% of those engaged in lobbying and close to 70% of the money spent. While Chau concedes that his measures are imperfect, they are directionally correct.

Behind the anti-AV campaign is the fear of job losses for union members. Such fear is understandable for the more than 4 million Americans who drive for a living, including long-haul truckers, delivery drivers, bus drivers and chauffeurs. At the same time, automation tends to replace tasks rather than whole occupations, as MIT’s David Autor showed in his remarkable 2015 paper “Why are there still so many jobs?”

Autor argues that making one step in a chain cheaper due to automation raises the value of every step that still requires a person, such as loading, the last mile of transit, distribution or dispatch. And AVs go only where the streets have been mapped block by block. Therefore, we may end up with fewer drivers but just as many good jobs in transportation.

We’ve seen this movie before. When ATMs began spreading through American banks, it seemed obvious that the machine dispensing cash would dispense with the bank teller. Something more interesting happened: As ATMs made branches cheaper to operate, banks opened more of them. Tellers spent less time counting out twenties and more time performing tasks machines could not. They became more involved in customer service, sales and other forms of relationship banking.

Technology automated a task and rearranged the work around it. The country has gone through this process at a large scale with the automation of farming.

It didn’t happen without displacement or pain. But protecting workers is not the same thing as protecting every job exactly as it exists today.

This is where I believe unions are making a mistake. A labor movement built for the modern economy could devote itself to training, certification and helping workers acquire skills that become more valuable as technology changes. It could help a truck driver become a fleet supervisor, a remote operator, a logistics specialist or whatever other occupation emerges around autonomous transportation that neither you nor I can predict today.

Instead, too many unions choose political power as their business model. Faced with technology that threatens an existing job, they lobby the government to preserve the job. That’s bad economics in any industry. In this one, it carries an additional cost. Delaying AV deployment might protect jobs in their current form, at least for a while, but it prolongs the use of what we’ll someday recognize was a primitive technology that killed tens of thousands of Americans every year.

Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called one decision “an assault on the very idea of democracy itself.” Vice President JD Vance sounded more moderate in tone but extreme in substance: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” The administration’s conception of its own authority appeared essentially limitless. Yet the judiciary has upheld much of the administration’s agenda. This past term the conservative Supreme Court majority issued several important rulings supporting the president’s position.

Ironically, despite his oft-expressed dissatisfaction with the opinions of some of his own appointees, the Democrats worked hard to push through their own appointees, with President Joe Biden eventually making two more federal judicial appointments than Trump. (The latter did two better in Supreme Court appointments than both his predecessors combined.) Although the Biden administration promoted a surprisingly modest judicial reform proposal, many progressives were not nearly so limited in their ambitions. They were horrified that the conservative majority resulting from Trump’s picks upheld the law and limited Biden administration abuses. Progressives were particularly appalled when the Supreme Court voted to reject previous judicial lawmaking and overturned Roe v. Wade. Even many traditional liberals criticized the opinion when it was issued in 1973, but five decades later most progressives viewed it as sacred writ.

Hence, a gaggle of legislators, commentators, and activists has increasingly demanded a radical transformation of the judiciary. The Left campaigned to effectively turn courts into just another form of legislature, allowed to make up new laws whenever the Zeitgeist struck. Which has been often. The result was a campaign for radical “disempowering reforms” including court packing.

Yet some conservatives today sound like lefties, especially in their attacks on Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The president has been especially sharp in his criticisms. They have forgotten that the judiciary’s fundamental role is to assess what the Constitution and statutes hold. Their job is not to uphold the president or impose MAGA policies. This means preserving Congress’ central role in policymaking. And enforcing constitutional and statutory limits on government power. MAGA activists often believe in and benefit from such decisions. But not always. Hence the outcry.

In fact, the New York Times got it right when it suggested that “even as the justices chose key moments to push back on Mr. Trump, the court’s conservative supermajority delivered generational, long-sought wins, including by expanding executive power, as the court that Mr. Trump remade in his first term continued a project of pushing the law to the right.” As a result, “The court’s rulings were more favorable to the administration as it defended the government broadly this year than during Mr. Trump’s first term or compared with all recent administrations since George W. Bush’s.” Indeed:

Among the big decisions that went Trump’s way were cases involving executive authority, religious liberty, asylum claims, deportation limits, racial gerrymandering, conversion therapy, campaign finance, transgender athletes, and gun rights. For instance, the Supreme Court upheld the unitary executive, meaning the president can fire officials at nominally independent agencies, with the apparent exception of the Federal Reserve. The president lost on tariffs, but the majority correctly chose to follow congressional legislation rather than presidential preference. The high court did uphold birthright citizenship — which I, along with the president, consider a dubious policy — but even many constitutional scholars believe that it reflected the meaning of the 14th Amendment. (The president says he intends to press the jurists to reconsider their decision, undoubtedly a forlorn effort.)

The carve-out on firing a member of the Federal Reserve seems unprincipled, but that is an affliction common to appointees across the political spectrum. The controversial decision to uphold counting mail-in ballots after the election was a matter of interpretation of a law which did not directly address the issue; the ambiguity required a judgment on meaning, not policy. In many cases the popular majority disagreed with the court, but most people weren’t familiar with the cases, let alone the arguments behind them.

Conservatives who have gone into mourning over what they view as judicial heresies should reflect on the positive transformation of the federal courts over the last half century. Members of the Warren Court of the 1960s often acted like wannabe legislators, determined to transform American society. Returning judges to their proper constitutional role was a major priority for the Reagan administration. I dealt with the issue after leaving the Reagan White House. The Robert Bork saga highlighted vicious opposition to a nominee with a much more limited view of judicial power. The conservative mantra then was that jurists should respect the law even when they disagreed with it. It has taken several decades, but now a majority of Supreme Court justices, at least, generally accept this position.

The issue was always fidelity to the Constitution, not activism per se. Jurists are to vigorously uphold the law. However, they should not consciously make up the law. Notably, in recent years the courts, despite the increasing disdain of some progressive Democrats, have become a critical fortress for religious liberty. For instance, in the 2012 case Hosanna-Tabor Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the unanimous Supreme Court voided the Obama administration’s attempt to prohibit religious schools from setting faith as an employment requirement. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the official opinion, noting that the government’s stance “is hard to square with the text of the First Amendment itself, which gives special solicitude to the rights of religious organizations. The Court cannot accept the remarkable view that the Religion Clauses have nothing to say about a religious organization’s freedom to select its own ministers.”

Of course, there is always more to do — conservatives should pursue broad judicial reform. A code of conduct would reduce perceptions of bias. Fixed terms and term limits would refresh the judiciary. Simplifying the amendment process for the Constitution would eliminate one argument for courts to act like constitutional conventions.

Conservatives should fight hard to promote their principles. One of those is belief in the rule of law. Famously, President Andrew Jackson was no fan of judges. Nevertheless, he argued: “All the rights secured to the citizens under the Constitution are worth nothing, and a mere bubble, except guaranteed to them by an independent and virtuous Judiciary.” That remains true today.

On the right, President Donald Trump wants AI companies to give “something back to the public,” and Sen. Josh Hawley (R‑Missouri) has expressed openness to taxation to make sure AI companies “are actually working for the public good.” On the left, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑Vermont) wants the public to own half of the biggest AI companies, and Rep. Ro Khanna (D‑California) has called for a tax on AI tokens, the basic data unit processed by large language models.

The various tax proposals rely on different mechanisms, but the same story motivates them.

It’s a story based on a zero-sum assumption — that gains for capital automatically mean losses for labor. Before becoming treasury secretary, Scott Bessent bought into it, arguing that since the 1980s, “capital has gotten treated better to the detriment of labor.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman linked the story to AI, claiming that he can “imagine” all the ways AI “breaks capitalism” by further shifting economic leverage from labor to capital. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

A third piece of the narrative is the belief that work is taxed at higher rates than capital — that is, that workers’ taxes are higher than those applied to the income from the investments used to create the AI systems and hardware supplanting them.

All three parts of this story are wrong.

Start with labor’s share of national income. If capital were dominating workers to their detriment, it would be clear in the data. Wages would stagnate. Capital’s share of economic output would climb. But this hasn’t happened. Measured properly, labor’s share of national income has fluctuated around 70 percent for almost a century. Workers are doing well by other measures, too, despite claims to the contrary. Real wages are up more than 40 percent since the 1990s. And a middle-class life has gotten cheaper over a similar period.

The more fundamental mistake is the setup. There is no existential tug-of-war between capital and labor. New tools such as AI make workers more productive, increasing their value and their ability to command higher wages. The digital spreadsheet didn’t wipe out accountants; it freed them from manual tabulation so they could focus on more valuable analysis that, in turn, led to higher pay. New investments expand the economic pie so both capital and labor can win.

The final misconception is that capital is undertaxed relative to labor. The statistics that give this illusion are mostly acts of accounting timing. Labor and capital both face top marginal federal tax rates of about 40 percent and average tax rates close to half that. Workers pay income and payroll taxes. Taxes on capital are usually levied at two levels, first through the corporate income tax and again through taxes on capital gains and dividends.

So, if new AI taxes are not the way to help workers, what should Washington do instead?

First, if the goal is to help workers directly, let them keep more of each paycheck. Congress can cut income and payroll taxes, paired with spending cuts. Spending cuts can have the additional benefit of shedding government programs that discourage work, crowd out private savings and divert capital from investments that actually raise wages.

Second, if the worry is about huge AI fortunes going untaxed in the loophole-riddled tax system, the answer is to tax wealth when it’s spent by reforming existing levies, not adding new ones. Rather than burdening electricity, machines, wages or investment when they are being productive, tax the consumption they fund. Tax the AI fortune when it’s spent, not the investment that builds tools that benefit everyone.

Finally, don’t tax AI, but don’t subsidize it, either. Letting companies immediately deduct their investments is equal treatment, not a handout. But there are plenty of handouts to repeal: transferable energy credits for the nuclear, geothermal and storage projects built to power data centers. Chips Act money for the circuits inside the data centers. And the cash grants, construction-wage credits and property-tax abatements some states offer data centers. End them all.

Taxing the machine to help the worker gets the economics backward. The story getting traction in Washington is exactly wrong: Capital, and the AI it funds, is more likely to be workers’ road to a raise than to their replacement.

Alas, their prescriptions aren’t new. Rather, they offer standard “leftish” economic nostrums. The only good news is that most of these “socialists” really aren’t socialists. At least in any normal sense of the term.

Start with Bernie Sanders. He had a genuine radical past, serving as an elector for the Socialist Workers Party in 1980 (a Trotskyite enterprise whose presidential candidate won all of 75 votes in Vermont that year) and spending his honeymoon taking a boat ride on the Volga River while visiting the Soviet Union. These days he appears, as a millionaire who owns three homes, to have cheerfully accommodated capitalism. His political program basically would leave the rich oppressors undisturbed so long as he gets to rake off a chunk of their earnings to redistribute.

So it is with most DSA candidates. Or at least, that is what they say. They typically push Medicare for all, demonize billionaires, promote higher taxes and social spending, etc. One can argue against such policies, which, alas, aren’t likely to well serve the American people—as economist Milton Friedman once said, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” (TANSTAFL!) However, this program is well within the normal political discourse of most Western democracies. There is coercion, since you must pay your taxes, or face confiscation and even imprisonment. Nevertheless, no one of note is advocating the wholesale federal takeover of private property, including businesses and other enterprises.

Of course, these issues are mostly prudential, not theological. Notably, Christian scripture does not prescribe any economic system. The “socialism” evident among the New Testament community, including donating and sharing property, was voluntary. “All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need,” we are told. (Acts 2:44–45) Neither the Jewish religious authorities nor the Roman imperial government were involved.

In his letter to the Corinthian church the Apostle Paul lays on a tough guilt trip should his correspondents fall short in aiding members of the Jerusalem church, telling them that “I am sending the brothers in order that our boasting about you in this matter should not prove hollow.” (2 Corinthians 9:3) However, he explicitly refuses to command them to give, instead testing “the sincerity of” their love. (2 Corinthians 8:8) Nor does he suggest that, if they fall short, the local public administration should step in and deliver the necessary funds.

As for current issues, God says nothing about, say, further socializing the health care market. A good society should care for those in need. But how? God leaves us to work that out. It is not enough to wish people well and walk away, according to Jesus’ brother James. (James 2:14–17) However, it also is not enough to advocate whatever fits our policy predilections if it doesn’t meet the need. For instance, to provide better health care it would be best to liberalize a service already under manifold governments’ (state and local as well as national!) control and place it under greater patients’ control.

Unfortunately, America’s professed “socialists” are inadvertently rehabilitating traditional socialism when they misuse that label. Younger Americans who were not alive when history delivered its judgment on the Soviet Union need to understand what real socialism is and why we are blessed that it is not on America’s policy agenda. Clearly inconsistent with Christianity is the Marxist-Leninist variant that characterized the death states of the 20^th Century. Most notably the Soviet Union, People’s Republic of China, Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia), and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea were serious about socialism and equally serious about forcing people to worship the state and its rulers as if they were gods. The result was mass impoverishment, degradation, and death. Worthwhile references include RJ Rummel’s Death by Government and The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, among many others.

Alas, any other system that sought to transfer most productive social assets to government also required systemic and sustained repression, almost always carried out with great brutality and cruelty. Go down the list—Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, the potpourri of Eastern European “satellites” of the Soviet Union, and assorted, usually short-lived, Third World socialist dictatorships. None respected personal autonomy, dignity, or liberty. None recognized individuals’ reliance on conscience, search for transcendent meaning, or commitment to God. None avoided the temptations and abuses of untrammeled, unaccountable, and especially absolute power.

Most American “democratic socialists” appear to be hyper-liberals/progressives. I don’t agree with them, but they are free to peddle their dubious political elixirs. However, they should come up with a different name for their movement. If they really are socialists, they should own up to what they are proposing. Applying the traditional principles of truth-in-advertising requires no less.

The reaction told its own story. Many readers – especially those on the American right who associate Israel with the defense of the West against political Islam – were stunned. “Why the hell” were there sharia courts in Israel, one asked. Israelis, another said, must have “lost their minds!”

They have not (at least not on this issue). And the surprise itself is worth unpacking, because it says something about how narrowly many people in the West have come to understand the legal traditions of Islam.

An Ottoman Legacy

First, some history: Israel’s sharia courts are not an Israeli invention. They are a holdover from the Ottoman millet system, under which the empire governed its many religious communities – Muslims, Jews, Orthodox Christians, Armenians, and others – not through a single uniform law, but by letting each community regulate its own internal religious and family affairs. Marriage, divorce, inheritance, and similar matters of personal status were left to the religious authorities of each community. More public matters (taxation, criminal law, land, commerce) remained under the Sultan’s civil administration. It was a remarkable example of what modern scholars call “legal pluralism,” which allowed a vast, multi-religious empire to hold together for centuries without forcing all its subjects into a single legal mold.

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed after the First World War, the British Mandate authorities in Palestine largely preserved this structure, and the newly declared State of Israel inherited it in 1948. Accordingly, the Jewish citizens would have rabbinical courts, while the Druze and various Christian communities would have their own religious tribunals. The same was true for the Muslim citizens of Israel proper – whose legal status differs sharply from that of Palestinians in the post-1967 occupied territories – who continued resolving their personal-status matters in state-run sharia courts, whose judges are elected through a public process involving the Knesset. Their jurisdiction is “limited to matters of personal status of Muslims only,” as the Israeli Ministry of Justice explains on in its website. So, they deal with issues such as marriage, divorce, alimony, financial relations between spouses, and “prevention of domestic violence.”

Greece’s Liberal Sharia

Israel is not alone in this. Greece – a European Union member state, a Christian-majority democracy quite far from anything associated with Islamic law – also has its own version of sharia law, in the northeastern region of Western Thrace.

This story, too, goes back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which was followed by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne between Turkey and Greece. Here the latter agreed to let its historic Muslim minority – some 100,000 to 120,000 people, mostly ethnic Turks – settle family and inheritance matters according to Islamic law, administered by government-appointed muftis in the towns of Komotini, Xanthi, and Didymoteicho.

This system in Greece has continued to date – only with a liberal reform in 2018, which came after the case of Hatijah Molla Sali, a Muslim widow who objected to getting a smaller share of her husband’s estate due to the sharia courts. The European Court of Human Rights found her objection valid, and Athens responded by making the sharia jurisdiction optional: Greek Muslims could now choose between sharia courts or the civil Greek courts for these matters, making sharia observance voluntary rather than compulsory.

In other words, the sharia system in Greece ended up being more liberal than in Israel, where religious courts are the only available option for family law – for Jews, Muslims, and others. In Greece, there is instead civil law for every citizen, while sharia is now optional for Muslims of Western Thrace.

Meanwhile, thanks to these surviving vestiges of Ottoman legal pluralism, both Israel and Greece ended up carving out more room for sharia law than Turkey does, since the latter went fully secularist with the Kemalist revolution of the 1920s and 30s. So, quite ironically, there are today sharia courts in Jewish-majority Israel and Christian-majority Greece, but not in Muslim-majority Turkey.

What About Stoning, Lashes, Executions?

But what about all the scary things about sharia that have shocked Western audiences for decades, with all those appalling stories from the Taliban’s Afghanistan or the Islamic Republic of Iran? What about all those harsh rules like stoning adulterers, amputating the hands of thieves, or flogging wine drinkers? What about sharia rules on executing apostates or blasphemers – crude violations of the freedoms of religion and expression?

These are legitimate questions. First, such violent and oppressive interpretations of sharia do exist. They are, in fact, somewhat mainstream teachings in medieval Islamic legal manuals in both Sunni and Shiite traditions. Moreover, there are Islamist groups willing to implement them in the modern world as much as they can. The political orders they aspire to are clearly at odds with some of the modern notions of human rights and freedoms. In a new book, Sharia Versus the U.S. Constitution, Egyptian-American scholar Ayman. S. Ibrahim highlights these stark contrasts. He points to some real problems – but his argument also leaves out some useful context.

It’s worth noting that most of these controversial aspects of the sharia belong to its penal code, which covers various religious and moral “crimes” are punished with archaic corporal punishments. But the penal code is a relatively small part of sharia. Other parts include commercial law, family law, and personal religious practices, areas that Muslims can follow without violating anyone’s freedoms – as they indeed do.

For Western Christians, who may be relatively unfamiliar with the concept of religious law, there is a helpful analogy: the halakha, or Jewish religious law, which is the closest parallel to Islamic sharia. (No wonder Israelis understand this much better than some of their Western supporters do.) Just like sharia, the halakha governs the personal practices of believers, the morals of the community, and the laws of the ideal theocratic state – which once also included things like stoning adulterers or blasphemers.

The big difference is that in the Jewish case, the theocratic state is long gone, and the penal code has been obsolete for nearly two millennia, while believers follow much of the halakha voluntarily, as a matter of tradition and piety. The same transformation – separating religious law from the coercive powers of the modern state – has not yet fully matured in Islam, but it is possible. (It is the kind of reform I myself have been advocating. See, for example, my book No Compulsion in Religion – No Exceptions.)

The better news is that this separation between sharia and state power is already the lived reality of over a billion people in the Muslim-majority world. Sharia’s penal code is enforced in only about a dozen “Islamic” states, like Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, or Saudi Arabia. The rest of the Muslim world, some 40-odd states, are either fully secular, like Turkey or Uzbekistan, or apply sharia only in family law, like Jordan or Indonesia (except Aceh Province). And while pious Muslim citizens of these countries may be careful to get married or according to sharia, for their own religious reasons, not all are eager to enforce it on others by making it the law of the land.

That is why there’s a name for those who are eager for such sharia triumphalism: they are called “Islamists.” While they may pose a potential threat to freedom – just like Christian, Jewish, Hindu, or other triumphalists – the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not, even when they honor the sharia.

Freedom Versus Coercion

The key measure here is freedom versus coercion: When a Muslim abstains from alcohol or wears a headscarf out of his or her own choice, without dictating it to anyone, that is sharia observed, not enforced. Similarly, when a Muslim couple wants to get married or divorced in the sight of an Islamic qadi rather than a secular judge, they are observing sharia for themselves, not enforcing it on others.

The sharia courts in Israel, as well as in Greece, give us an idea of how this live-and-let-live accommodation could be structurally arranged. The sharia councils in the UK – not “courts” with binding decisions – present a less formal version, operating on the basis of the British Arbitration Act, which also allow Jewish religious councils called Beth Din. And in the United States, the Constitution already secures robust religious freedom. “And that’s all we ask for,” as one American imam said recently at a congressional hearing on “Islam, Sharia, and the U.S. Constitution.”

Such syntheses between modern liberal states and Islamic piety, and honest conversations about them, are much needed today. They will help us avoid spending the rest of this century in clashes of religions and civilizations. They will also help more Muslims appreciate the value of freedom, which is all they need to practice their religion.

At least he ended his participation on a positive note.

“There was tremendous unity in that room,” declared the president. “There was a love in that room. It was great. So this was a tremendously successful summit.” Of greatest policy relevance was his announcement that “We want to remain with you.”

These came after an unnamed NATO diplomat told Politico Europe: “I’m sick and tired of panicking about Trump.” The diplomat nevertheless praised Europe’s increased defense efforts: “We have to do this for ourselves.”

Most European states are taking their defense responsibilities more seriously, which is welcome. Washington’s overwhelming military role in NATO was necessary at the beginning of the Cold War. Western Europe and Japan had been ravaged by war and were vulnerable to diplomatic coercion and even military attack. No one knew if the Soviet Union would do so, but no one wanted to risk such dangerous uncertainty.

That world disappeared, however, after America’s defense dependents recovered economically. Unfortunately, both sides continued to support the US military dole. Members of Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy “Blob” preferred to dominate global and allied affairs, despite the policy’s significant cost. Allies preferred to focus on domestic development, including their burgeoning welfare states, leaving security to the US.

Eventually, the imbalance grew too great, and a succession of American officials pushed the Europeans, in particular, to do more, with only indifferent success. In 2011 Defense Secretary Robert Gates famously warned future American officials “may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.”

Donald Trump seemed to be that person. Despite his rhetorical excess, though, the president did not make good on his threat to leave the alliance in either his first term or the first 18 months of his second term. Rather than negotiate a structured political and military withdrawal from NATO, leaving the Europeans to decide on their own security policy, he evidently prefers using America’s continuing presence to shake down allies economically, imposing tariffs, obstructing regulations, and forcing investment. For him, the military is more a mercantilist than a security tool, and it worked on Europeans who abhorred the cost of declaring independence from the US.

Now he is reversing that approach, turning mercantilism into a security tool, though in practice he is more likely to harm America’s international position by doing so. Trump has long targeted Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for rejecting NATO’s increasing spending standards, despite their manifold loopholes. Sánchez’s position is understandable: no one believes that Vladimir Putin’s legions will imminently approach the gates of Zaragoza, Barcelona, Seville, Valencia, or Madrid. Moreover, Sánchez’s stand against US military and foreign policy, along with other high-profile progressive advocacy, has bolstered his popularity, a particularly important factor given the political misconduct scandals besetting his government.

Now Trump is considering reverse mercantilism by cutting off US trade with Spain even though the latter buys more from America than it sells, thereby reducing America’s global trade deficit, a long-time Trump goal. Last year the president complained that Spain was “unbelievably disrespectful” and threatened to end trade with that nation, and in March repeated that position. The issue then faded as he appeared to lose interest in favor of his Washington, DC construction projects and Middle East warmaking.

Alas, the latest NATO summit apparently rekindled his anger and he again threatened economic war against Madrid. He termed it a “terrible partner in NATO” and a “wasted cause. We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore.” 

Sánchez denied any tension, responding: “Relations between the United States and Spain are very positive relations in social, cultural, economic and also political terms.”

This time Trump issued instructions. In Ankara, the president publicly told Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent: “I don’t want to do any trade with them, alright?” He added: “I don’t want anything to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, please, including visits, OK?”

Bessent responded “yes, sir” and several agencies began developing a “menu” of products to be banned. Most likely, the administration would use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to embargo some or all Spanish imports. This follows similar threats from four months ago. Then the president appeared to flip-flop again, declaring: “They honored a request for lots of payments, and if they didn’t, we wouldn’t have even talked to them.” (Apparently, Madrid convinced him that it met the current NATO standard.)

Had he moved forward, the administration would have had to ground its decision in national security and declare a national emergency, as it previously did against Cuba and North Korea. But Spain poses no comparable challenge, no threat by any serious definition. No doubt, the issue would have ended up in court. As the president discovered in February, his power over trade is not plenary. The Supreme Court rejected his attempt to use the IEEPA to launch trade wars with virtually every other nation on earth. Although jurists tend to defer to presidential claims in such cases, they recognized that he was grossly abusing emergency provisions for partisan policy purposes. Trump’s continuing, extravagant demands stirred opposition even among the long-submissive GOP congressional caucuses.

Cutting off Spain would be bad policy. Americans benefit from commerce with the Spanish.  

From them, Americans purchase olive oil, refined petroleum, electrical transformers, perfumes, vaccines, ceramics, wine, gas turbines, tires, aircraft parts, and nuts. From us, the Spanish buy crude petroleum, pharmaceuticals, petroleum gas, vaccines and other medical products, gas turbines, aircraft and spacecraft, soybeans, and nuts. Then there’s investment banking: “BlackRock holds €104 billion ($119 billion) worth of Spanish equities, debt and other assets, and Spain is the US-based firm’s main bet at a global level for the next six months,” Reuters reported.  

Fundamental liberty is also at stake. Trade is not government-to-government, but person-to-person and firm-to-firm. Nor is it a restricted legal privilege. Commerce occurs because both sides gain. The president might want nothing to do with Spain, but millions of Americans do. They trade with people and visit Spain. US policy should not be based on a president’s arbitrary anger and personal pique. It should reflect America’s national interest, not his belief that he is “running the world” and therefore is entitled to arbitrarily impose his will. Ironically, Sánchez is implementing Trump’s governing philosophy, a form of “Make Spain Great Again,” acting in Spain’s interest rather than that of other nations, including the US.

Mercantilism was largely abandoned because it hindered economic success and undermined national development. It was bad when Trump adopted that failed model as America’s new approach. It became much worse when Trump malformed security policy to reinforce his mercantilist approach. Punishing Spain, or any other nation that ends up in his sights, would hurt Americans even more.

NATO’s Ankara summit delivered little of the expected fireworks. Unfortunately, however, though superficially successful, it reinforced the outdated policies of American primacy and European dependency. It also highlighted Trump’s mercantilist bent and willingness to sacrifice Americans’ economic interests for dubious political ends.

We all are likely to be poorer as a result.

Each episode has been reported, with people raising questions about Mr. Trump’s behavior. But what makes such conduct possible in the first place? Democrats rightly blame the man.

But there is another culprit. The power of the federal government, which commands the fate of every major enterprise in America. A tariff waiver can mean billions for one company and bankruptcy for its rival. An antitrust filing can erase a decade of shareholder value in an afternoon. A procurement decision can build a company, and a regulatory finding can bury one. When the government holds that much influence, officials need not even demand tribute. Tribute arrives on its own.

The problem arose long before 2025. When government can make or break a business, businesses will invest in making friends with government, and the return on a lobbyist will exceed the return on an engineer. Corruption and discretionary power go hand in hand.

There is a remedy, though it comes from an unfashionable quarter. Libertarians have long argued for a wall between the economy and the state: a government confined to courts, defense and a handful of public goods—too small to be worth bribing. Nobody buys favors from an office that has no favors to sell. A president who can’t reward a donor with a tariff can’t be paid for one.

The Democratic Party rejects that remedy. Its answer to the corruption it decries is personnel: Elect us, and we will staff the agencies with people of integrity. The claim deserves scrutiny rather than applause.

James Buchanan, who received the 1986 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and Gordon Tullock argued in their 1962 book, “The Calculus of Consent,” that politicians and bureaucrats respond to incentives just as merchants and consumers do. Buchanan called for “politics without romance.” Voters may imagine that office transforms self-interest into public spirit, but no mechanism exists to perform that transformation. The behavior of officials is governed by what the office rewards, not by what the campaign promised.

Friedrich Hayek, another Nobel laureate, carried the argument further in “The Road to Serfdom” (1944). A state that dispenses fortunes will attract the people most eager to dispense them; positions of discretionary power select for those who relish wielding it. Screening for virtue can’t prevent that, because the applicant pool is already sorted by appetite, and the appetite grows with the budget.

The Democrats’ proposed programs would let officials choose which factories rise. Subsidies for favored technologies would let officials choose which investors prosper. Price regulation would let officials decide which companies earn a profit—and which don’t. Every one of these tools gives officials more decisions to sell, and every decision worth money to a business is a decision some business will pay to shape. A party proposing to multiply the levers of economic power is proposing to multiply the buyers lining up to pull them.

The question for Democrats isn’t whether they disapprove of the current president’s conduct. It is what feature of their program would prevent similar conduct under a president of either party. Their platform contains no such feature, demanding instead more agencies, more waivers, more approvals—more of the raw material from which favors are minted. To the question “Why would your government be cleaner?” the answer “because we are better people” isn’t convincing. It is a request for faith that Buchanan and Tullock’s public-choice theory gives us every reason to withhold.

That may solve a puzzle that has vexed the president’s critics. Their charges are documented, yet the charges don’t move voters as they should. Perhaps the voters have intuited what Mr. Trump’s critics haven’t, or pretend they haven’t—that the accusers propose to keep the machine and merely change the operator. An electorate offered a choice between two managers of the same favor factory may reasonably shrug.

The Founders foresaw figures like Mr. Trump. They did not foresee a government of the current scope and size. The way to end the sale of government favors is to close the store. Until one of our parties says so, the outrage will remain what it is today: sincere and useless.

Greenspan’s critics argue he carries much of the blame for the crisis and the housing bubble that triggered it, due to the low mortgage rates on his watch from 2000 to 2006, as well as his support for deregulation. Missing from this evaluation of Greenspan’s career is any recognition that for extended periods during the postwar era, mortgage rates were significantly lower than they were in 2000-06, yet they created no housing bubbles. Also missing is that for two decades leading up to the crisis, financial regulation grew stricter.

From 2000 to 2007 inflation-adjusted mortgage rates averaged 3.4%, almost triple the 1.2% between 1971 and 1980 and roughly double the rate from 2010 to 2025, yet there was no housing bubble or resulting financial crisis during either period. There is no evidence in postwar America that low interest rates precipitated a housing bubble except during the 2008-09 financial crisis.

Those who argue that Greenspan helped deregulate the financial system have yet to explain when this deregulation occurred. Through the passage of major laws like the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991, not to mention the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, federal regulators gained expansive powers to impose new risk-based capital standards, increased reporting and compliance requirements, prompt corrective action rules and corporate governance rules. The only law that could remotely be called deregulatory in any sense was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999.

Gramm-Leach-Bliley, of which one of us was the principal Senate sponsor, amended the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act to allow banks, securities companies and insurance companies to affiliate under well-capitalized financial-services holding companies. But it didn’t deregulate anything. It established the Federal Reserve as a new superregulator overseeing all financial services holding companies. All activities of banks, security companies and insurance companies continued to be regulated under the same laws and by the same regulators as before, and by any measure Gramm-Leach-Bliley holding companies held up better during the financial crisis.

Contrary to the popular narrative, for at least three decades preceding the housing crisis, financial regulators gained more power and larger budgets and hired more personnel than ever. The Mercatus Center has found that from 1970 until the housing bubble burst, regulatory restrictions increased 250% and the number of regulatory personnel grew about 77%. There is no evidence that things would have been different if financial regulators had more authority or resources.

The true cause of the financial crisis wasn’t low interest rates or deregulation, but instead bad regulation and plenty of it. For almost two decades leading up to the housing bubble, government regulation encouraged, cajoled and mandated financial institutions to loan money to high-risk borrowers who bought homes they couldn’t afford. Greenspan consistently warned against the worst of it.

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 was originally a modest bill requiring banks to meet local credit needs. But during the Clinton administration bank regulators began using CRA to pressure banks to make subprime loans to low-income and underserved communities. Guidelines were turned into mandates and banks couldn’t even open an ATM, much less acquire another bank, if they didn’t receive a passing grade. According to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, total CRA lending increased from $8.8 billion between the law’s enactment and 1991, to $4.5 trillion from 1992 through 2007 when the housing bubble burst. Greenspan testified before Congress that “the early stages of the subprime [mortgage] market … essentially emerged out of CRA.”

At the precipice of the financial crisis, the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with their implicit government guarantee and imprimatur, either securitized or guaranteed roughly half of all mortgages in the U.S. Effective 1993, they were required to make 30% of their mortgage purchases so-called low- and moderate-income housing loans. That quota was gradually ratcheted up to 56% by 2008, when Fannie and Freddie collapsed, leading to perhaps the largest institutional bailout in U.S. history. A 2003 Fannie memo stated that because of the affordable-housing goals Congress imposed, Fannie “did deals at risks and prices we would not have otherwise done.”

Conflicted legislation created conflicted regulations and regulators. Safety and soundness considerations required regulators to hit the brakes, while affordable-housing goals required them to step on the accelerator.

A review of Greenspan’s statements before the financial crisis shows that he was the earliest and most consistent government official to sound the alarm about the building threat from the securitization of subprime mortgages. In congressional testimony after the crisis, he said: “The evidence strongly suggests that without the excess demand from securitizers”—meaning Freddie and Fannie—“subprime mortgage originations, undeniably the original source of the crisis, would have been far smaller and defaults, accordingly, far fewer.”

Unfortunately, Greenspan’s inarticulate answer to a question about his regulatory philosophy was widely reported, and his definitive statement on the cause of the crisis wasn’t. This helped feed the false narrative that financial deregulation caused the financial crisis, which was then used as a pretext to pass a massive expansion of government regulation of the financial system instead of a badly needed reform of government housing policy. Using Greenspan’s death to restate this same false narrative in no way changes the fact that he was arguably the greatest central banker in the history of our country.

In New Jersey, scarcity isn’t just measured by waiting in line for electricity — it shows up every month when utility bills continue to climb.

The problem isn’t simply that electricity has become more expensive. It’s that energy policy has become focused on managing scarcity instead of creating abundance.

Think about electric lighting. Two centuries ago, people relied on candles and oil lamps. Businesses closed when the sun went down, and families carefully weighed whether another hour of light was worth the expense.

Today, almost no one thinks twice about flipping a switch. Lighting didn’t become affordable because governments became better at rationing candles. It became affordable because innovation made electricity abundant — and increasingly efficient.

Throughout history, predictions of energy scarcity have repeatedly underestimated human ingenuity. Railroads, aluminum production, air conditioning, the internet and now artificial intelligence have all been portrayed as threats to limited energy supplies.

Yet history tells a different story. When markets are free to innovate, entrepreneurs build more supply, engineers improve technology, investors expand infrastructure and yesterday’s scarcity becomes today’s ordinary convenience.

New Jersey needs more energy, not more rationing

New Jersey should embrace that same mindset. Rather than debating how to divide a limited supply of electricity more efficiently, policymakers should focus on producing more of it.

That challenge is especially relevant today. Electricity demand is rising rapidly as artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and data centers reshape the American economy. A growing economy requires a growing supply of affordable, reliable electricity.

Fortunately, New Jersey doesn’t have to start from scratch. One of North America’s largest natural gas resources sits just across the Delaware River in Pennsylvania.

Yet policies that have restricted pipeline development and limited new energy infrastructure have made it harder to deliver affordable energy to New Jersey consumers. When supply is constrained, higher prices are the predictable result.

The same supply-focused thinking is beginning to emerge elsewhere. Gov. Mikie Sherrill recently signed legislation designed to encourage continued investment in New Jersey’s nuclear fleet — a recognition that preserving and expanding reliable, around-the-clock generation must be part of any long-term affordability strategy.

Recent reforms are a good start

Against that backdrop, Sherrill recently signed an electricity reform package that deserves recognition.

The legislation strengthens oversight of utility transmission spending, eliminates an outdated incentive related to regional electricity markets and requires the largest new electricity customers to bear more of the costs they impose on the grid.

For New Jersey families who saw electricity prices rise sharply in 2025, these reforms are a welcome first step.

The changes could save New Jersey ratepayers more than $1 billion annually. More importantly, they signal a shift in thinking.

For decades, energy affordability has often meant rebates, subsidies, tax credits or bill assistance after electricity prices had already increased.

Those policies may help consumers cope with higher costs, but they do little to address why energy became more expensive in the first place.

The next step is even more important: building an energy system capable of producing enough affordable, reliable electricity to support long-term economic growth.

Building an energy-abundant future

One promising reform would allow large new electricity users — such as data centers and advanced manufacturers — to develop privately financed electricity systems operating independently from the traditional grid.

Rather than requiring every major new customer to use the same monopoly framework, New Jersey could allow companies to build private electricity networks tailored to their needs.

Creating this parallel path would accelerate investment, encourage innovation in how electricity is produced and delivered and strengthen New Jersey’s ability to compete for the industries driving the next generation of economic growth.

Abundance-minded reform means making it easier to build new generation, modernize transmission infrastructure, encourage private investment, expand opportunities for privately financed electricity systems and allow companies to finance the energy resources they need.

It also means embracing an energy strategy that preserves dependable baseload generation while expanding new sources of reliable electricity.

New nuclear energy, expanded natural gas infrastructure, renewables where they make economic sense and emerging technologies all have a role to play.

The objective should not be choosing winners and losers. It should be ensuring New Jersey has enough electricity to power the next generation of economic growth.

Consumers don’t care whether affordable electricity comes from a Republican idea or a Democratic one. They care that the lights stay on, businesses continue investing and monthly bills remain affordable.

The purpose of energy policy isn’t to manage scarcity. It is to create abundance. New Jersey’s future prosperity depends on producing more affordable, reliable electricity and the infrastructure needed to deliver it.