“I write to you because you cannot simply walk away from Trump’s recklessness, shaking your heads silently. You have a job to do, so do it. The craven Republican Party has to find even a minimal level of guts to tell Trump, ‘No, you do not have the power to destroy Iran. Any war with Iran depends on us, and we don’t support you and our constituents want this war to stop.’ A clear majority of Americans oppose this war, and poll after poll shows that the opposition to the war is growing. A few Republicans have found that courage. Last week three more Republicans broke ranks to support ending the war. Their colleagues should follow.” (09/28/26)
“Most indicators suggest that the Republicans in the House and Senate are going to face a brutal backlash from the American people in November. Polling with generic ballots suggest a big win for the Democrats and likely the loss of Republican control of both houses of Congress. There is little reason to cheer a Democratic party victory, however Republicans in charge have for the most part earned what is coming to them. They have refused to uphold their Constitutional obligation to take leading responsibility for war powers.” (09/28/26)
“On September 3, 2026, President Trump pardoned Navy veteran Patrick Adamiak for crimes he didn’t commit. The pardon should have happened sooner, but at least it’s happened. It was especially important because in May of this year the Supreme Court declined to review Adamiak’s case. … In 2021, somebody sent a tip to the ATF about his gun collection. Adamiak ‘said he didn’t want to go to the trouble of maintaining a federal firearms license. So he only collected non-firing replica weapons.’ But we don’t need to take Adamiak’s word for the fact that they were nonfiring. In a report filed with the court, ATF agent Daniel Beasley admitted that he had to alter an inert STEN machine gun to get it to fire a bullet.” (09/28/26)
“In the years before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the descent of much of Europe into ‘the Great War’, most of the ideologues on the Left assumed that such a war was an impossibility. The workers of the world, they believed, would no longer go to war against one another. Their class solidarity was too strong, far stronger than their national allegiance and their fidelity to artificial borders and superficial ethnic differences. Engels, for one, thought the old ways had been thoroughly demystified and discredited. The ‘new man’ (the Communist man) was better than the old man, more organized and less aggressive toward his own kind. Darwin, Engels insisted, had described ‘a struggle for existence’ that applied to the animal kingdom, not to the expected Communist society.” (09/28/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“[T]he Ellis Island system wasn’t an open-border system. It was actually the start of a border-control system that would ultimately morph into the massive immigration police state that we have today, which has now broken out of the borderlands and is being expanded nationwide. A genuine open-border system is one in which there are no restrictions on the free movement of people into and out of the United States. That was the system that characterized the United States from the time that the Constitution was ratified until the federal government began imposing significant immigration restrictions in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It was also the system that existed between the U.S. and Mexico from 1848, when the U.S. government eagerly absorbed the northern half of Mexico, until the 1930s, when, during the Great Depression, Mexican immigrants were increasingly blamed for unemployment and subjected to mass repatriation.” (09/28/26)
“Rome has provided both inspiration and warnings for Americans since our founding. Roman influence is in the names of our institutions (Senate, Capitol, republic, plebiscite, tribunal, census, veto, candidate, magistrate, quorum, et cetera) and in the very architecture of Washington, D.C. The Framers studied Roman history closely and built a formal Constitution to avoid Rome’s mistakes. Most importantly, they made it a higher law that ordinary legislation could not override, a concept Rome never quite developed, to their detriment. Unfortunately for us, that innovation alone is not enough. Americans have been comparing ourselves to the Romans since 1776 and before.” (09/28/26)
“Organizing and running elections in the United States is left to individual states to determine and oversee. But this month alone, the U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in on these processes multiple times. On Sept. 14, it issued a one-paragraph concurrence limiting proposed federal changes to mail-in voting. Earlier this week, Missouri’s redistricted voting map was back on the emergency docket for the third time this month. And on Friday, the court ruled to allow use of a vast federal database to check voter eligibility. Amid the legalese and partisan arguments surrounding such cases, American voters are both confused and concerned about the trustworthiness of the country’s election processes. According to two recent surveys, the share who believe that November midterms will be ‘fair’ ranges from 49% to 55%.” (09/26/26)
“Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously said, ‘Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.’ Friedman’s statement, clear and to the point, is supported by a mountain of evidence. From extended unemployment and crop insurance to deposit insurance and mass income tax withholding, these are but a few ‘temporary’ programs that traded their provisional status for permanency. Each of these examples, as well as many others, has something else in common. That is, each was born because of crisis. From economic recessions to war, policies and programs begun in the name of combating today’s threats have a unique way of staying long after the crisis has passed. This phenomenon is not a relic of centuries past, but one that remains wholly relevant today.” (09/28/26)
“October is when hype meets reality. In baseball, the final teams are sorted out for the playoffs, and your football teams are well into the winnowing-out process for the Super Bowl. For court nerds, the start of the October term at the Supreme Court can have a similar dynamic, as long-watched cases finally come up for oral argument. Although the court continues to accept cases on a rolling basis, this term is looking like another blockbuster, with cases that range from climate change to gun rights to parental rights. The odds of making the oral argument docket make the NFL season look like a walk in the park. After thousands of petitions, the Supreme Court accepts on average between 70-80 cases for the coveted ‘writ of certiorari.'” (09/28/26)
