“Todd Blanche, the acting United States Attorney General, appeared in Congress last week for his confirmation hearing. There was much talk on the administration’s weaponization of the Department of Justice against its political opponents. 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.” (07/23/26)
“In 1923, New York police entered Broadway’s Apollo Theater and shut down an English-language production of a popular Yiddish play, Sholem Asch’s Got fun nekome (‘God of Vengeance’). Officers arrested the entire cast and production team, including prominent First Amendment lawyer Harry Weinberger of Abrams v. United States fame. The raid led to a sprawling obscenity trial that sharply divided the New York Jewish community. Got fun nekome was supposedly ‘obscene’ because it portrayed a Jewish family that defied norms of gender and social status. … Some Jewish leaders at the time feared that the play’s portrayal of Jews would inflame antisemitic stereotypes. … let Sholem Asch’s words guide us now. The mere fact that a message could provoke ill will toward Jews does not justify stamping it out in the name of Jewish safety.” (07/23/26)
“Renewables are not just for highfalutin hippies, they’re cheaper and avoid the volatility of wars and chaotic leaders. We are not living the 1970s oil shock moment; there are alternatives to fossil fuels. Those who embrace renewable energy will be better off—from health benefits for communities to reducing energy shock burdens for households. The reality unfolding during this latest oil war is that many nations really do not want to be tethered to volatile energy resources. And who can blame them?” (07/23/26)
“AConstitution that divides power among three branches and between the federal government and the states needs an umpire. Politicians, responding either to their own interest in expanding their authority or to public passions, will frequently overstep constitutional boundaries. Through judicial review, the Supreme Court therefore serves as a neutral arbiter charged with maintaining the Constitution’s boundaries. But the Court itself is an institution that must respect its own boundaries. Thus, in every constitutional case, the preliminary question is whether the Court can reach and resolve the constitutional issue in a manner consistent with the proper limits on its own power. This term, in two of its most notable cases, Trump v. Barbara and Trump v. Cook, the Court transgressed those constraints.” (07/23/26)
“The key to understanding the difference is the noun. In social democracy, the priority is democracy. Under democratic socialism, the emphasis is on socialism, with democracy reduced to a mere modifier. Social democrats want to remediate some of the injustice and unfairness that comes with unfettered capitalism. I get it: After all, I lived through the Russia of the 1990s. Ultimately, whatever disagreements I have with social democrats, we share common ground as democrats. The same cannot be said for many socialists.” (07/23/26)
Source: Christian Science Monitor
by the Editorial Board
“The rule of law across Europe is on a ‘broadly positive trajectory,’ according to the just-released 2026 European Commission Rule of Law Report. Reforms that bolster independent justice systems and align anti-corruption rules to continentwide principles are part of this arc. In a global context, where democratic norms appear to be on the back foot and several governments are flexing authoritarian muscles, this is good news. But in a note of caution, the same document also points to uneven progress – particularly among Eastern and Central European countries.” (07/22/26)
Source: Popular Information
by Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, & Noel Sims
“On Wednesday, the Trump administration signed a 30-year nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that paves the way for the kingdom to enrich its own uranium. The Saudi government has been aggressively seeking such a deal for years, eager to gain an edge over regional rivals. The agreement lacks safeguards that previous administrations, and many independent foreign policy analysts, viewed as essential to prevent nuclear proliferation. The deal comes after the Saudi government’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) invested $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s private equity fund, Affinity Partners. Since 2021, Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, has collected over $110 million from the Saudi government in management fees.” (07/23/26)
“Freedom of speech is an integral aspect of authentic freedom, grounded in the distinctively human capacity to adhere to truth through persuasion rather than imposition. While truth is objective and independent of the knowing subject, it can only be received by the subject freely. We can contrast this with a thinly grounded notion of freedom as merely a pragmatic expedient to ‘get along’ in a pluralistic society in which we assume that truth is more or less unattainable. In this thin form of liberalism, when it no longer appears the optimal empirical solution to maintain social comity or stability, freedom of speech will be easily abandoned. We have seen this dynamic play out in Western societies in the past decade, where elites now frequently insist that censorship is necessary to ‘protect democracy’ from the populist rabble.” (07/23/26)
“When we imagine a threat to free speech, we picture a ban — a law forbidding certain words, a prosecutor charging a dissenter, an official with a censor’s stamp. That picture is increasingly obsolete. The gravest threats to expression today rarely announce themselves as censorship. They take the form of ordinary administration turned to punishment — a grant frozen in reprisal, a clearance revoked over a dissenting view and, most insidiously, a damaging official label affixed to a company for the positions it has taken. The designation does quietly what the censor’s order once did openly.” (07/23/26)
