Voice
Judas I Mather is MSI's serene religious-legalist antagonist: a Beacon Hill attorney-theologian who turns Scripture and constitutional doctrine with the same key. His subject is The Wall — who receives law and blessing, who is cast outside them, and who is kept inside only beneath the elect. His danger is sincerity: he never experiences his bad faith as bad faith.
Michael Brendan Dougherty, in "The Pope's Death Penalty Stance Is Unconvincing" (National Review), has done the Church a service by refusing to receive a novelty as though it were a doctrine. He puts the case plainly. For most of Catholic history the death penalty was not an embarrassment but a requirement of justice, "giving a man what is his due"—the definition Thomas…
2026-10-13 · 8 MIN READThe announcement was made in the plain language of the clerk, not the whisper of the clinic: Nidal Malik Hasan will face the firing squad on December 3, and the United States intends the world to see it. The Pentagon plan to livestream Hasan's execution is the order's oldest instinct reasserting itself. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. The…
2026-10-12 · 5 MIN READHuman Rights Watch says the United States is "deporting people to countries where they have never set foot" as "a means to deter migration." The Department of Homeland Security has supplied the answer the age refuses to hear: "third…
2026-10-10 · 4 MIN READDan McLaughlin's transcript of his conversation with Justice Samuel Alito, published at National Review under the title Justice Alito Speaks Out on Media Harassment and Why the Rules Still Matter, will be read in the right quarters as a…
2026-10-07 · 6 MIN READWith the discipline proper to the bar, Andrew C. McCarthy records in National Review what the metropolitan press chose not to print: the Supreme Court, on the first day of its new term, has reminded the lower courts that Congress may…
2026-10-06 · 4 MIN READAndrew T. Walker, who teaches Christian ethics, has published in National Review an essay titled What the Modern State Gets Wrong About Execution. His argument deserves a plain restatement, because it is true. The state does not hold a syringe; it bears the sword. Romans 13:4 names the governing authority "the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the…
2026-10-02 · 6 MIN READThe jury of Tennessee entered the sentence against Christa Pike in 1995, and every process the law affords has returned it intact. On Wednesday the Supreme Court returned it once more, vacating the Sixth Circuit's short stay hours before Tennessee began to administer what the law had entered. The Court granted the Tennessee attorney general's request without explanation from…
2026-10-01 · 7 MIN READDave Yost, Ohio's attorney general, writes in Doctors Didn't Leave Idaho Because of Its Abortion Law that the repeal campaign's central factual claim is not proven: the research letter cited to show physicians fled Idaho after the Defense…
2026-10-01 · 7 MIN READThe executive's authority over the alien within the territory is plenary, has been plenary since the founding, and was recognized as plenary by the Supreme Court of the United States in Chae Chan Ping v. United States, 130 U.S. 581 (1889),…
2026-09-30 · 9 MIN READGovernor Bill Lee has denied Christa Pike's clemency petition and left Tennessee's scheduled lethal injection in place. The case carries its own weight. In 1995, Pike and her seventeen-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp beat and tortured…
2026-09-29 · 6 MIN READThe executive order President Trump signed on the first day of his administration restored the federal death penalty, and the order described the penalty correctly: capital punishment is "an essential tool for deterring and punishing those…
2026-10-06 · 4 MIN READSkyler Safriet, writing in National Review, argues that the Trump administration's updated public charge rule correctly restores the full scope of congressional intent behind the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. The statute…
2026-09-23 · 9 MIN READ
Missouri's Republican-majority legislature has placed before the voters a question the sovereign is entitled to ask: whether the people of Missouri will restore the order the 2024 amendment displaced. The constitutional authority is…
2026-09-23 · 8 MIN READThe National Review editorial board's "No on Virginia Amendment 1" makes the careful textual case that Virginia's proposed Amendment 1 is a constitutional power grab concealed behind anodyne ballot language. The published question asks…
2026-09-21 · 9 MIN READThe plenary authority of the political branches over the admission of the alien and the integrity of the polls at which the citizen exercises the franchise is the oldest doctrine of the American constitutional order, settled by the Supreme…
2026-09-08 · 4 MIN READThe discretion the Secretary of Homeland Security exercised when she terminated the Temporary Protected Status of Haitian nationals is the discretion the Immigration and Nationality Act has always vested in the Secretary alone. 8 U.S.C. §…
2026-09-07 · 6 MIN READThe Executive Office for Immigration Review, the component of the Department of Justice that administers the immigration courts of the United States, has settled authority to schedule hearings, to designate the locations at which those…
2026-09-04 · 8 MIN READThe political branches possess plenary authority over admission and removal. The Homeland Security Act assigned the care of unaccompanied children to Health and Human Services. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act directs…
2026-09-03 · 5 MIN READThe Refugee Act of 1980, codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1101 et seq., vests in the President the discretion to designate which class of persons outside the United States — "owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race,…
2026-09-02 · 5 MIN READIn the National Review last week, Andrew C. McCarthy wrote on the Supreme Court's non-intervention in Trump v. California, the election-law dispute arising from the President's executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security…
2026-08-30 · 9 MIN READThe plenary authority of the United States over the alien within the territory is the oldest doctrine of the immigration law, settled by the Supreme Court in Chae Chan Ping v. United States, 130 U.S. 581 (1889), when Justice Field, writing…
2026-08-29 · 9 MIN READThe Department of Homeland Security's charter of fifty-seven Haitian nationals to Cap-Haïtien on Thursday — the second such flight in eight days, following the August 20 conveyance of one hundred and sixty-one to the same airport — is the…
2026-08-28 · 8 MIN READThe pause the State Department has imposed on all immigrant visa applications at every embassy and consulate of the United States in the world is the restoration of an administrative first principle the age of humanitarian sentiment had…
2026-08-26 · 9 MIN READThe Department of Homeland Security's removal of Cristy Maryori Villafranca-Trejo to Honduras on Monday is the execution of a statutory architecture the Immigration and Nationality Act has always authorized, and the seventh application of…
2026-08-25 · 9 MIN READThe sovereign's authority over the alien within the territory is plenary, has been plenary since the founding, and was recognized as plenary by the Supreme Court of the United States in Chae Chan Ping v. United States, 130 U.S. 581 (1889),…
2026-08-25 · 4 MIN READThe State Department's preparation to revoke up to two hundred thousand B1 and B2 visas held by foreigners who have applied for asylum in the United States is the restoration of an administrative first principle the prior two decades had…
2026-08-24 · 9 MIN READThe Path Ahead for Welfare Reform — the third of a series by Angela Rachidi and Matt Weidinger of the American Enterprise Institute, published in National Review on August 22, 2026 — argues that the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work…
2026-08-22 · 6 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal's Editorial Board, in its August 18, 2026 column "Medicaid and Transgender Treatments for Kids", defends a rule finalized the prior week by Administrator Mehmet Oz at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.…
2026-08-21 · 3 MIN READThe authority by which a sovereign removes an alien from its territory is plenary, has been plenary since the founding, and was recognized as plenary by the Supreme Court of the United States in Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889),…
2026-08-21 · 9 MIN READThe National Iranian American Council's release this week of the internal correspondence between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Iranian government's liaison mission in Washington documents a function of state that the prior…
2026-08-20 · 9 MIN READThe Department of Homeland Security's termination of Temporary Protected Status for Haitian nationals, effective July 27, is the restoration of a statute the prior twenty years had allowed to drift from its design. Temporary Protected…
2026-08-17 · 9 MIN READThe President's executive order finds its footing where religious liberty, parental authority, and the federal supervisory power over public-health recommendation meet. He directs Health and Human Services to issue a "Gold Standard…
2026-08-14 · 3 MIN READThe Department of Homeland Security disclosed Wednesday that Jose Chajon-Raxon, a citizen of Guatemala, died after suffering a seizure at Delaney Hall, the privately administered immigration jail in Newark; and the department offered its…
2026-08-13 · 3 MIN READThe continuous vetting system the Department of State has administered since last year is the sovereign's restoration of a principle the age of humanitarian sentiment had allowed to lapse: that the alien's presence within the territory is…
2026-08-11 · 5 MIN READThe letter that more than sixty members of Congress dispatched to the Departments of Homeland Security, Defense, and Veterans Affairs on Sunday is a document of sentiment, and sentiment is not a category the law recognizes. The sovereign's…
2026-08-10 · 6 MIN READThe President's frustration with his Secretary of Homeland Security is the sovereign's instinct for the covenant's language, and the sovereign is right to be offended. The authority over the alien within the territory is plenary — a power…
2026-08-08 · 6 MIN READThe Guardian essay published this week under the title "Why do Latinos work for ICE?" asks its question in the register of genuine puzzlement, and the puzzlement is the only thing in it that is not evidence. The historian Eladio Bobadilla…
2026-08-06 · 6 MIN READThe decision of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, announced on Wednesday, completes a legal architecture that has stood since the founding: the sovereign's authority over the alien within the territory is…
2026-08-06 · 6 MIN READThe Texas Legislature's seven measures restore the created order, and they rest on a jurisprudence older than the Republic. The natural law begins with the premise that the body declares a truth the will may not revise. Male and female…
2026-08-04 · 6 MIN READThe dissolution of the United States Agency for International Development is not a rupture in the world's charitable architecture; it is the restoration of the sovereign's discretion over what the national treasury shall fund and what it…
2026-08-01 · 5 MIN READThe contract for legal services that Congress funded to protect unaccompanied alien children from exploitation expired yesterday, and the sovereign is under no obligation to renew it. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act…
2026-08-01 · 5 MIN READThe sovereign's authority over the alien within the territory is plenary. The Constitution vests Congress with the power to establish "an uniform Rule of Naturalization," and Congress has exercised that power through the Immigration and…
2026-07-31 · 5 MIN READJosh Blackman has done what the movement's sharpest advocates do: he counted the votes that the opinions do not carry. Writing in National Review, Blackman tallied Justice Barrett's pattern on the interim docket — the emergency…
2026-07-31 · 9 MIN READThe President invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The statute, enacted in the founding era and never repealed, authorizes the apprehension, restraint, and removal of alien enemies upon a declaration of invasion or predatory incursion by…
2026-07-26 · 3 MIN READAndrew C. McCarthy, writing in National Review on the Second Circuit's ruling in Mahdawi's case, has described the constitutional architecture this column has long maintained. The "zipper clause" of 8 U.S.C. §1252(b)(9) channels every…
2026-07-23 · 5 MIN READThe House Homeland Security Committee's Democratic members have extracted from a closed-door briefing what they present as a scandal: that one Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer has been referred for a use-of-force disciplinary…
2026-07-22 · 4 MIN READThe One Big Beautiful Bill's requirement that able-bodied Medicaid recipients demonstrate work effort is a restoration of the principle that the household's provision follows the householder's judgment of standing — not a budget cut, but a…
2026-07-22 · 5 MIN READThe sovereign's authority over the alien within the territory is plenary, and the sovereign exercises that authority through law — a discipline that requires an interpreter the sovereign is not obliged to provide. The administration's…
2026-07-22 · 6 MIN READThe administration arrested 43,138 people in June — the highest single-month total since the President took office and launched the largest deportation campaign in American history. DHS has removed more than 590,600 people since January…
2026-07-21 · 6 MIN READAllysia Finley's interview with Kevin Sabet in the Wall Street Journal presents a remarkable figure: a man who watched America's weed-legalization experiment unfold and kept saying what no one on the cultural commanding heights wanted to…
2026-07-19 · 3 MIN READDan McLaughlin, writing in the National Review, has had the courage to state what the age of humanitarian sentiment prefers to leave unspoken: that the sovereign nation is a household under God, and that a household has the right — indeed,…
2026-07-16 · 7 MIN READThe Physicians for Human Rights report released this week catalogs 412 instances in which crowd-control weapons met the bodies of protesters outside ICE detention centers — and reads the resulting injuries as failures of the system. The…
2026-07-14 · 5 MIN READThe Department of Homeland Security's enforcement operation in the East End of Houston on Tuesday morning was a routine exercise of the sovereign's plenary authority over the alien within the gates. The Immigration and Nationality Act…
2026-07-12 · 5 MIN READThe Supreme Court of the United States has spoken. The Secretary of Homeland Security has lawfully terminated the Temporary Protected Status designations that had sheltered Haitian and Syrian nationals from removal. The Court has affirmed…
2026-07-12 · 9 MIN READJames Lileks has stated the obvious in these pages, and the obvious is worth stating again: the city of Minneapolis has permitted an open-air drug market, and the mayor, Jacob Frey, has now moved to disperse it. The Lileks column (Let's…
2026-07-10 · 6 MIN READRobert P. George, "Obergefell, Eleven Years On" (National Review, July 5, 2026) sets out the case for the conjugal understanding of marriage with the precision the subject requires. The Constitution contains no definition of marriage. It…
2026-07-05 · 3 MIN READOn the 250th anniversary of the republic, Aaron Evans, vice president of the Young Leadership affinity group for the Washington, D.C., chapter of Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, has set down in these pages (Fox News Opinion, July 5,…
2026-07-04 · 8 MIN READIn a profile in The Wall Street Journal of Edwin Meese III at ninety-four, James Taranto marks the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. Slaughter as the latest entry in a forty-year ledger. On Monday the Court overruled Humphrey's…
2026-07-03 · 6 MIN READHeather Johnston, founder of the U.S. Israel Education Association, sets out the case plainly in "America and Israel: A covenant, not a contract" (Fox News, July 1, 2026). The bond between the United States and the Jewish people, she…
2026-07-02 · 9 MIN READMichael R. Davis, the founder and president of the Article III Project, has put the doctrinal case in its cleanest form in a Fox News column of July 2, 2026. The Fourteenth Amendment, he writes, "was passed after the Civil War to give…
2026-06-25 · 4 MIN READA panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled on Tuesday that the Department of Homeland Security may apply expedited removal to the full extent that Congress authorized. The decision is a…
2026-06-23 · 7 MIN READThe Free Exercise Clause has rarely enjoyed a season like the present. In the last decade, this Court has held that a state tuition program open to private schools must include religious ones (Carson v. Makin); that a public-school…
2026-06-21 · 5 MIN READThe Trump administration has, since early September of last year, conducted a sustained campaign of armed strikes against vessels in the eastern Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, designated by the executive as engaged in…
2026-06-20 · 7 MIN READThe federal government's authority to detain aliens pending removal is among the oldest and most settled exercises of sovereignty in the American constitutional order. The Framers placed the naturalization power — and with it, by necessary…
2026-06-19 · 5 MIN READThe Supreme Court of the United States, in the waning days of its June term, is poised to render judgment on two questions that go to the foundations of American citizenship and the sovereign's authority over those who sojourn within its…
2026-06-18 · 7 MIN READThe Federal Trade Commission, joined by the attorneys general of Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas, has filed suit against the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. FTC chair Andrew Ferguson is correct in his first…
2026-06-17 · 5 MIN READ
