Source: Eunomia
by Daniel Larison

“Condoleeza Rice confirmed once again this week that she has learned absolutely nothing: ‘When I hear, ‘Well, it wasn’t imminent,’ I think, ‘Do you really want to wait until it’s imminent, or do you want to try to degrade it earlier?’’ she continued. As George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor, Rice was one of the chief architects of the criminal war of aggression against Iraq. Decades later, she is still spouting the same nonsense to support Trump’s criminal war against Iran. It isn’t surprising that Rice falls back on the same arguments to defend the Iran war that she used when she was selling the invasion of Iraq almost a quarter of a century ago.” (07/16/26)

https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/rice-defends-another-war-of-aggression

Source: The Erick Erickson Show
by Erick-Woods Erickson

“Here is the point that gets lost in the partisan scorekeeping. It does not matter whether each arrangement is technically legal. The swamp was never a legal problem; it was a trust problem. When the party that promised to end influence-peddling instead perfects it — when access to the president can be bought with a memecoin and a black-tie ticket — the lesson every ambitious operator learns is that the spoils go to whoever holds power, and restraint is for suckers. That is the real cost.” (07/16/26)

https://ewerickson.substack.com/p/drain-the-swamp-dont-recycle-the

Source: Exiled Policy
by Jason Pye

“You don’t have to like the outcome of the election to accept the fact that Trump won in 2016 and lost in 2020. What this address to the nation appears to be about is sowing more division and casting more doubt on elections in the United States. Trump can’t accept that his approval rating is underwater because a) he’s not focusing on key economic issues that Americans care about, b) he started a war with Iran that drove up oil and gas prices, and c) he seems to be more concerned about vanity projects in the District of Columbia than anything else.” (07/16/26)

https://exiledpolicy.substack.com/p/trumps-speech-on-thursday-will-relitigate

Source: Reason
by Damon Root

“President Donald Trump failed in his efforts to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court into upholding his executive order on birthright citizenship, which would have stripped that constitutional guarantee from millions of babies born on U.S. soil. Now a Republican lawmaker is hoping to effectively overrule that Supreme Court decision with a proposed bill that would resurrect Trump’s unlawful order and place it in the federal statute books. As The Hill reports, ‘Indiana Republican Sen. Jim Banks on Monday introduced a bill that would codify President Trump’s Day 1 executive order reshaping the definition of birthright citizenship in the U.S.’ There’s just one problem with Banks'[s] scheme: Trump lost the birthright citizenship case Trump v. Barbara on constitutional grounds, which means that any federal law repeating Trump’s already rejected position would be equally unconstitutional under the very Supreme Court precedent that Banks is now hoping to evade.” (07/16/26)

https://reason.com/2026/07/16/no-congress-cant-just-overrule-the-supreme-court-on-birthright-citizenship/

Source: Law & Liberty
by Sarah Gustafson

“A Chinese writer uses Alexis de Tocqueville to defend the CCP.” (07/16/26)

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/freedom-with-chinese-characteristics/