“One of the best parts of last year’s reconciliation bill was the introduction of an accountability rule called the Do No Harm rule that will cut off student loans for programs where students earn too little after graduation. The bar is very low. For undergraduate programs, graduates will only need to earn more than a comparable high school graduate who did not attend college, and for graduate programs, students need to earn more than those with a bachelor’s degree. Programs that fail to meet this benchmark for two out of three years would lose access to the federal student loan programs. Nevertheless, there are many programs that do not clear this very low bar.” (05/20/26)
“I argue that the United States has had three systems of federal administrative procedure: a two-track system lasting from the Founding to the Gilded Age, a second system from the late 1800s to the 1960s that would be codified in the APA, and the third system that was constructed beginning in the 1960s and that we still live in today. This piece covers the first two of these systems: the development of federal administrative procedure from the Founding to the enactment of the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946.” (05/20/26)
“It is not just us peons (middle or lower class, out of government, etc.) that should listen to the advice on whom to trust. Even the most powerful and secure of human rulers, princes, leaders, etc. need to remember that they cannot trust other rulers, etc. Even those less powerful than they are. We should remember that far more kings, presidents, etc. have been betrayed and overthrown by other powerful people than ever deposed by true grassroots actions.” (05/20/26)
“Trump and Miller understand that immigration is most valuable to them as a source of perpetual outrage and political mobilization. A humane, functional immigration system would be a liability, not an achievement, because it would deprive them of the issue. Trump literally instructed his party to back away from immigration legislation — legislation that included everything his side had been asking for — so that the issue would retain its political salience and he could continue to campaign on it. The Alligator Alcatraz cruelty thus satisfies the ideological commitment while simultaneously keeping the cameras on how Trump is steamrolling the undocumented, one merch push and viral image at a time.” (05/20/26)
“The distinguished political scientist Graham Allison, author of the 2015 Atlantic article ‘The Thucydides Trap,’ argued that often in history an established power will stage a preventive war against an ascendant adversary — for fear that otherwise it will soon lose its primacy. His title derives from two passages in the first book of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides …. [The US] is the supposed jittery established power — and a rising Communist China is the upstart contender. His theory implies that the US might, like Sparta, take provocative steps to abort an inevitable Chinese-dominated world. There are, however, a number of problems, ancient and modern, with Allison’s intriguing thesis.” (05/21/26)
“Illinoisans know the terror the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can inflict with its unlimited resources and unchecked power. We have been surveilled, threatened, tear-gassed, shot, subjected to warrantless arrest, rammed with vehicles, kidnapped and disappeared. In the time since Donald Trump regained the White House, our communities documented, witnessed and testified to DHS’s abuses. In April, the Illinois Accountability Commission published its final report, which included recommendations that local law enforcement pursue criminal and civil prosecutions against federal agents who used excessive force. One incident highlighted in their report is the violence that occurred on Oct. 3, 2025, in Logan Square at Funston Elementary, when federal agents deployed tear gas close to the recreational area where children were present. The Commission determined what we already knew: Federal agents should be formally investigated for possible violations of agency policy, state and federal criminal laws and individuals’ constitutional rights.” (05/20/26)
“Before demanding more money from America’s wealthiest, lawmakers should account for the billions of dollars the federal government wastes each year.” (05/20/26)
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Matthew Harwood
“By the time of his death and subsequent desecration, Paine had fallen out of the American pantheon of Founding Fathers, reviled as an alcoholic infidel. But as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of both Common Sense and the American independence his pen sparked, Paine deserves his due and our gratitude. Without the words of Paine, the most modern of the Founding Fathers, there may be no United States of America to even celebrate today.” (05/20/26)
“The term ‘libertarian’ first emerged in the 1850s as a self-description for a French anarcho-communist who thought private property and the state were two sides of the same coin. By 1913, Charles Sprading was using it to describe a tent that included Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Single-Taxers, Anarchists, and Women’s Rights advocates. By the mid-twentieth century, under the influence of Leonard Read and the Foundation for Economic Education, it had narrowed to mean support for free markets and limited government. By the 1970s, the Nozick-Rand-Rothbard synthesis had narrowed it further still — to a particular form of rationalist, rights-based, free-market absolutism. Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, the label fragmented again. Bleeding-heart libertarians, left-libertarians, paleolibertarians, neoreactionaries — all under the same tent, none in agreement about what the tent contains. The current crackup isn’t an aberration. It’s what libertarianism has always done.” (05/20/26)
“For a long time, Representative Thomas Massie confidently defied an ironclad law of modern Republican politics — that to oppose President Trump was to start a ticking clock on your electoral career. ‘I’m not worried about losing,’ he told me last spring inside the Capitol, as he explained to a group of reporters the strength of his support within his Kentucky district. … last night Massie met the same fate as so many of Trump’s Republican critics: He lost his primary. … For months leading up to the primary, Massie had held up his race as an important test case for the Trump era: If he could criticize the president and win anyway, his victory would embolden other Republicans to speak out and vote against Trump when they felt compelled to, loosening his viselike grip on the party.” (05/20/26)
