The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Double Tap Dance | The Roundtable Ep. 296

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is being accused of war crimes after allegedly making a so-called “double-tap” strike against Venezuelan drug traffickers. But it may just be a double distraction, allowing critics of Trump both to avoid more serious questions about immigration policy and to pull attention from the tragic shooting of two National Guards in DC by an Afghani national. This week, the guys are joined again by Matthew Peterson to discuss US operations in South America and the Left’s unsubtle hints that soldiers might need to disobey orders. Plus: Kash Patel as FBI Director: the right man for the wrong job? 

The post The American Mind Podcast: The Roundtable Episode 296 appeared first on The American Mind.

Many conservatives, myself included, have recognized the wisdom of a populist turn in our politics. A roused populace was necessary to address the growing illiberalism and sheer unaccountability of woke elites who, for at least a generation, have committed themselves to redefining the theory and practice of liberal democracy. But populism also has marked limits, especially when applied to the realm where principle and prudence, in the high and noble Aristotelian or Burkean sense, must inform action.

Populist anger must be calibrated and channelled so that it does not become self-destructive. The welcome resistance to the progressivist “culture of repudiation,” as the late Roger Scruton so suggestively called it, must not give way to a rival spirit of repudiation on the Right that dismisses our intellectual and political forebears as fools and frauds. “What has conservatism ever conserved?” is both historically illiterate and politically ungrateful.

When the young and activist militants on the disaffected Right reduce Winston Churchill to the status of a dangerous forerunner of neoconservative foreign policy, or see in Ronald Reagan nothing but a sterile libertarianism—ignoring his courage and determination to defeat the scourge of communist totalitarianism, and his eloquent appeals to faith, community, and patriotic devotion to country—or facilely dismiss the pugnacious and brilliant William F. Buckley, Jr. as a RINO and puppet of the liberal establishment, something has gone seriously wrong. These ill-conceived judgments need to be corrected for the sake of truth and for preserving our shared moral and civic inheritance, which is what the Constitution calls our “blessings of liberty.”

Serious conservatives should not only fight woke despotism but also the new pseudo-rightist culture of repudiation at the same time. Indeed, it would be a mistake to imitate the ’60s Left, with its almost pathological fear of upsetting “the kids,” as they were then called. Happily, some young conservatives are rediscovering faith and the deeper wellsprings of Western civilization. They should be encouraged and tutored. This is an eternal imperative, now urgent in our time due to disturbing trends that are more and more apparent in younger generations.

As Eddie LaRow pointed out in a recent insightful reflection at The American Mind, Gen Z has faced a series of troubling events, one after another, ranging from growing up under the thumb of censorious progressive teachers and school administrators to the government’s heavy-handed response to COVID. This has caused young men to increasingly take their bearings from unsavory podcasts and streamers. Legitimate suspicion of politically correct orthodoxies has, in some quarters, given way to a nihilistic suspicion of all inherited truths and judgments. In certain corners of the disaffected Right, “international Jewry” is seen at work everywhere, while the palpable threat of militant Islam, which is visible in the massive persecution of Christians around the world—especially in Nigeria—is all but ignored.

These young souls have been deeply wounded by tyrannical wokeness without ever being exposed, or adequately exposed, to the deeper wisdom on offer from Western civilization or the American civic tradition in republican self-government. Ironically, the disaffected Right is following in the very footsteps of the progressives themselves as they utterly reject their intellectual and political patrimony.

In the face of this creeping nihilism, we must offer them something better. We need to renew the serious thought that grounds and defends the precious goods of faith, family, and nation. Without it, many of the spiritually adrift young will continue to succumb to the false allure of neopaganism and the new pseudo-rightist culture of repudiation. This means that we conservatives must not tiptoe around this spiritual and intellectual crisis that risks morphing into a civic crisis. To ignore it would only exacerbate the situation. It would be a disaster not only for the conservative movement, but, far more importantly, also for the country as a whole.

Conservatives must effectively communicate a spirited regard for liberty, civilization, and human dignity, together with an underlying commitment to moderation rightly understood. The task is daunting, but our times require it, and our resources can fund it.

Perhaps above all, we must avoid the obverse error of what we oppose. Ours is and must be an anti-ideological politics. This means we must appeal to common sense, and to the common sense of the people. However, common sense must have living roots in what Cicero called “right reason” (recta ratio). This displays itself in the two-fold domain of the intellection of the true, the good, and the beautiful, and in the cultivation of practical reason and tough-minded moderation in the political realm. Populism will flounder if the common sense of the people is not renewed at these wells.

Our task, however, is not just intellectual. Liberal democracy, as any number of thinkers and statesmen like James Madison have taught, requires a certain degree of virtue in the populace. Here too we must take seriously the notion of a “virtuous people” (the phrase is Willmoore Kendall’s) dedicated to self-government in the personal and collective senses. It is not just the youth that need conservatism’s permanent truths.

Conservatism rightly understood will always stand in some tension with populism. And that will be magnified especially if the latter loses its connections with what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called in his 1978 Harvard Address “the great reserves of mercy and sacrifice,” the legacy of the Christian centuries that was alive and well in “early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth.”

This is why I think Christopher Long and Thomas Lynch, who recently resigned from the board of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, are wrong for linking a “post-liberal hijacking” of the Right with the recent developments on the disaffected Right that I have highlighted. As Daniel McCarthy has argued at The American Mind, the post-liberals are our allies in the crucial task of tying self-government to a richer and deeper understanding of the human person at the heart of Western civilization.

True, there will be tensions and disputes. But in the battle on the two fronts I have limned here, they can be allies, though we must resist the temptation of some post-liberals to find in the American Founding a “poison pill” inevitably unleashing atomistic individualism and moral relativism. What is needed to make this alliance truly effective is a common commitment to what Tocqueville called “liberty under God and the law,” and a shared recognition that debased liberalism, with its inordinate emphasis on human “autonomy,” has rejected what is best in the liberal tradition itself. 

We should follow the example of America’s own thoughtful, sober, and reflective statesmen, who did not completely reject their inheritance after declaring, and then winning, independence from the British. They self-consciously drew on the modern idiom of natural rights without repudiating the reality of a natural moral sense or moral law. They loved liberty but did not endorse radical individualism or a conception of happiness that was inherently hedonistic or relativistic. They cared deeply about honor and self-respect and never succumbed to “Year Zero” thinking, as if they could create the world again from scratch.

For the American Founders, the centrality of consent in the political order did not demand that all human relations be rethought in a radically voluntaristic way. Nor did they conceive of a human and political world where only the state and the individual have ontological reality, so to speak.

As I will argue in a follow-up piece, one can appreciate the serious limits of philosophical liberalism, or important currents of it, without rejecting liberalism tout court. The future we build together must be both liberal and post-liberal. Our task must be to preserve the work of our Western and American forebears by building on their achievements while reconnecting freedom to the larger ends and purposes that inform it and give it life.

The post Rediscovering the Soul of Conservatism, Part I appeared first on The American Mind.

I have a longtime friend—I’ll omit his name because he is somewhat politically prominent—who has been very involved in the extraction of Afghans from Afghanistan who allegedly helped us and resettling them in the United States. My friend already has a demanding job, but he has often worked through the night, forgoing sleep to help with this task.

I have a number of strong political disagreements with him, but I would never question his patriotism. He voluntarily served as a soldier in Afghanistan after overcoming great obstacles to be accepted into the military. But I would strongly question his political judgment, and the judgment of anyone who thinks we should be settling Afghan refugees in America.

Unfortunately, a number of our former soldiers, no matter how sincere their beliefs, seem to sympathize more with people in a foreign country whom they believed, rightly or wrongly, to be allies rather than with the interests of the only country to which they owe their allegiance.

Joe Kent, an Afghanistan combat veteran and director of the National Counterterrorism Center, argued on social media for the deportation of all of our “Afghan allies”: “Vetting a foreigner in a war zone to determine if he will fight a common enemy is vastly different than vetting a foreigner to see if he is suitable to live in our country.” As journalist Daniel Greenfield notes, the targeted attack on two National Guardsmen by an Afghan national in Washington, D.C., the day before Thanksgiving was not a one-off. It’s part of an extensive series of assaults by Afghans whom we have foolishly allowed to resettle in America.

Having lived briefly in a Third World country and having traveled for many years in various countries of that description, you quickly learn to be very wary of “friendships.” It is not that people in these countries are bad people or incapable of genuine friendship in principle. It is that the gap between you (a well-off American) and them (a Third World citizen who, even if relatively affluent, is often at a huge disadvantage vs. an American) is astronomical.

And that gap is not just financial and legal, but also based on traditions and customs. Relationships that may feel like genuine friendship for a time usually come with future requests or pleas for assistance. Again, I don’t necessarily blame these people—I might do the same in their shoes—and of course genuine friendships in such situations are possible, but they are far rarer than idealists might wish them to be.

What applies in basically peaceful Third World countries applies a thousandfold in an impoverished, war-torn, and primitive country like Afghanistan. It is monstrously arrogant to think the American political class understands deeply the inner workings of these countries and the motivations of the people there, given that we spent almost a trillion dollars to occupy Afghanistan, only to see all of our efforts collapse within a week after we removed our military as a threat of force.

Wade Miller, the Executive Director of Citizens for Renewing America and a U.S. Marine combat veteran, responded to the claim that resettling Afghans was the moral thing to do since they “[f]ought alongside our own” soldiers, rightly calling it a “bs metric.” As he noted, “1. Many played both sides. 2. Many only did it to make money. 3. Many were plants. 4. Many had long standing tribal grudges against the Taliban.”

And none of them necessarily has a long-term loyalty to America, which is the first step to assess before even beginning to consider a claim of residency. All of this would be obvious to anyone who does not let good sense overwhelm suicidal empathy. But unfortunately, we have lost that common sense, even among many of our supposedly hardened fighting forces.

Miller punctures the lie that we owe these Afghans for “doing America a favor,” pointing out that we did them a favor by expending an enormous amount of American lives and treasure to help them govern themselves without the Taliban. But “the second the U.S. military backed out, their men folded and refused to fight for what we gave them. We don’t owe them, they owe us.” This is a harsh assessment, but in aggregate, it is not an unfair one.

Or consider what Mark Lucas, an Afghanistan veteran and founder of the Article III Project, has written: “Afghans were untrustworthy allies who sold their children to pedophiles, ritually raped little boys, and beat their women.” He notes that without male soldiers guarding them, countless local Afghans made clear they would have raped the women who were attached to their detachment.

Lucas points out that even asking simple questions of potential Afghan asylees, such as whether they support putting apostates to death, child marriage, sharia for non-Muslims, defense of suicide bombings, polygamy, and honor killings, would quickly disqualify them. The vast majority of Afghans, he says, support one or more of these views—none of which are compatible with the American way of life. Indeed, one of the few Afghan refugees who resettled in my own state of Montana promptly raped a Montanan shortly after his arrival (unsurprisingly, the crime and its implications were shamefully under-reported by local media).

Furthermore, even assuming we have an obligation to those we believed helped us in Afghanistan, it would mean we were obligated to get them to safety—not get them to America. If we had made it clear at the outset that relocating to America was not on offer, we’d see a drastic reduction in the number of “refugees.” We can and should resettle them in other countries. Making arrangements to do that is a worthy use of American soft power.

The notion that resettling Afghans in America is a moral duty is reflective of President Biden’s poor political leadership. His administration, and previous ones before it, had become arrogant about their ability to control events and remake complex societies and peoples far different from our own. In reality, their policies promoted cultural arrogance under the guise of friendship. They abandoned our own in favor of those from distant cultures and distant lands.

Let us hope that President Trump’s promise to refuse all new Afghan visas and to remove post-war Afghan arrivals and resettle them elsewhere is the start of a more sober, realistic, and serious refugee policy that will put the interests of America and its citizens first.

The post Settling Afghans Here Puts America Last appeared first on The American Mind.

As a pessimistic Boomer (and Big Law veteran) who channels Robert Bork, I regard the state of our politics in the MAGA era the same way Charles Dickens did in A Tale of Two Cities nearly two centuries ago: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” I try to temper my gloominess about the current zeitgeist by aiming for a perspective somewhere between Pollyanna and Jeremiah.

Thanks to President Trump, the 6-to-3 originalist majority on the Supreme Court is the only thing standing between us and the abyss—a hellish combination of Deep State corruption, socialist economics, cultish wokeism, and cultural degeneracy. Yes, President Trump has over three years left in his second term, and is heroically trying to drain the swamp. But Congress is gridlocked, the midterms loom, and recent election results suggest the MAGA agenda is not as popular as Trump’s 2024 drubbing of Kamala Harris might indicate. She was, after all, the weakest Democratic candidate for president since Michael Dukakis in 1988. Unlike Trump in 2024, the Bush/Quayle ticket won an Electoral College landslide, and a majority of the popular vote. The nation is much more divided now.

Despite all of this, unlike my friend Jesse Merriam, I am encouraged by the state of the conservative legal movement—at least relative to the Left’s capture of so many other American institutions.

Merriam provides a partial roll call of favorable Supreme Court decisions issued in recent years, but omits other important victories. For example, Janus v. AFSCME (2018) disallowed the payment of compulsory agency fees to unions by non-consenting government employees, overturning Abood v. Detroit Board of Education (1977). U.S. v. Skrmetti (2025) rejected an equal protection challenge to a ban on “transgender” procedures for minors, allaying concerns over Justice Gorsuch’s misstep in Bostock. Other notable reversals are on the horizon, including Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), which hamstrung the unitary executive, and possibly Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), which ushered in the disastrous doctrine of disparate impact.

The Court will never be able to fix all the errors that have accumulated since it began to meet in 1790. Perfection is a utopian fantasy, especially in politics. For the first time in nearly a century, however, the Court is tacking in a conservative direction after decades of disappointment from feckless Republican-appointed justices. Recall that Roe v. Wade (1973) was a Burger Court decision written by a Nixon appointee. And Nixon was not alone in making bad Supreme Court appointments. William Brennan and Earl Warren were both nominated by Dwight David Eisenhower. The only solid conservative appointed by Nixon was William Rehnquist, who thereafter earned the title of  “Lone Ranger” due to writing 52 solitary dissents. This was the extent of the conservative legal movement at the time.

Reagan disappointed with Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, but scored bigly with Antonin Scalia. The elder Bush gave us David Souter—but also Clarence Thomas. Bush 43 absurdly nominated Harriet Miers before settling on the stalwart Samuel Alito. In short, the Supreme Court was often a mess before Donald Trump. And the resulting constitutional jurisprudence was an incoherent mélange of liberal pablum, a doctrinal wasteland. But not anymore.

A good deal of the credit for this must go to the Federalist Society, founded in 1982 (after I graduated from law school). I am a longtime FedSoc member and used to attend the National Lawyers Convention in Washington, D.C., each November until the event grew so big that it was unworkably large and lacked intimacy.

Even so, legal academia remains captured by the far-left, as is the ABA. Democratic leaders have vowed to pack the Supreme Court should they regain control of Congress. Most state bar associations, virtually all large law firms (in particular their robust “pro bono” programs), and the majority of lower federal court judges appointed by Obama and Biden (who are responsible for the judicial resistance to Trump 2.0 raging in many blue states and blue cities) are a testament to the Left’s still considerable power.

The “biggest enemies” of the conservative legal movement have not been “vanquished,” as Merriam asserts. They have merely been held at bay temporarily. We are still engaged in a perilous conflict with the Left.

When he assumed that Hillary Clinton would be elected in 2016, Harvard Law School professor Mark Tushnet, a Marxist who was hired when Justice Elena Kagan was dean, candidly revealed the Left’s blueprint for transforming the Court. In a post for the influential Balkinization blog entitled “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism,” Tushnet published a veritable Rules for (Legal) Radicals: the wholesale overruling of disfavored precedents, giving no quarter to the “losers” in the culture wars (that is, us), emulating the uber-activist Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, and so forth. Tushnet, writing in mid-2016, concluded his overconfident reverie with this note of warning: “Of course all bets are off if Donald Trump becomes President.”

The Left’s ruthless ambition remains unfulfilled. Given the caprice of the electorate, the Sword of Damocles dangles ominously every four years. Our current safety is fragile, and subject to the whims of politics. We live in fraught times.

I understand the griping that goes on in some circles on the Right about FedSoc being part of “Con, Inc.,” being preoccupied with legal minutiae instead of cultural issues, and favoring “establishment” candidates for Supreme Court appointments. I must admit to having indulged in some of this myself from time to time. However, no organization—or movement—is perfect. Some of the FedSoc’s clique of insiders were slow to get aboard the Trump Train. In 2016 some self-proclaimed “originalists” even endorsed Hillary Clinton. (Most of the signatories thankfully came to their senses later on.) The fact remains that FedSoc is the only countervailing force in a legal community overwhelmingly dominated by the Left. Despite its David vs. Goliath disadvantage, it has served as a battle flag around which center-right lawyers, law students, law professors, and judges can—and do—rally.

Critics may charge that FedSoc is just a “debating club” with no fixed “legal agenda,” to use Merriam’s words, and encompasses almost disparate factions on the Right (libertarians and social conservatives). True, but if the organization advocated specific policies, judges would be precluded by ethical rules from participating. FedSoc’s only agenda is restoring the rule of law envisioned by the American Founders.

FedSoc is not static, and the focus on debate creates a marketplace of ideas that winnows out the losers. In the past decade, various theories were advanced on the Right, given a platform by FedSoc, and disappeared for want of a following, such as right-on-crime (criminal justice reform), “judicial engagement” (libertarian judicial activism), and “common-good originalism,” which was motivated by the perception that “original” originalism had stalled. Of course, Dobbs and SFFA v. Harvard showed that patience has its virtues.

FedSoc is dynamic, just as conservative politics is dynamic. Tellingly, FedSoc increasingly showcases conservative talent from outside the Beltway. Fifth Circuit Judge Andrew Oldham, author of the epic 130-page dissent in W.M.M. v. Trump (an Alien Enemies Act case) that persuaded his court to grant rehearing en banc, delivered the 24th Annual Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture at this year’s FedSoc National Lawyers Convention. Similarly, MAGA-friendly South Texas College of Law professor Josh Blackman has supplanted familiar Acela corridor scholars as a leading legal commentator for both FedSoc and The Heritage Foundation.

The conservative legal movement is not monolithic, because the Right consists of a diverse assortment of factions with different points of view. This distinguishes us from the activists on the Left, who largely march in lockstep in their common quest for power and control. This is a strength of our movement.

The conservative legal movement, like conservative politics in general, continues to evolve due to shifting challenges, personalities, and circumstances. President Trump’s election in 2016 and re-election in 2024 will continue to alter the course of the Supreme Court for decades. The movement cannot be divorced from conservative politics in general. As Merriam has noted elsewhere, the conservative legal movement “must have in place a powerful electoral constituency,” that is, popular support. This means we face both political and cultural issues.

Has originalism become obsolete in 2025? Is Merriam right that it consists only of “technocratic exercises,” “performative jousting over narrow interpretive questions,” and “shadow-boxing legal liberalism”? Does originalism reflect a stagnant (or “calcified”) strategy “designed for a different country and a different time”? I don’t think so. Originalism is manifestly working. Courts are not legislatures. Per Federalist 78, they have “no influence over either the sword or the purse…and can take no active resolution whatever. [The judiciary] may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.”

Jettisoning this limited role in lieu of becoming “guardians of our social order” and stewards of “civilizational restoration” would abandon the premises of our Constitution. It would create a “bevy of Platonic guardians” who would be indistinguishable from the left-wing judicial activists under the New Deal and the Warren and Burger courts, whose destructive handiwork we are in the process of undoing. Conservatives, unlike leftist apparatchiks, should honor the Constitution and the blessings of liberty it was designed to foster.

The post A Tale of Two Trends appeared first on The American Mind.

In his opening essay, Jesse Merriam calls for a more positive, more substantive, and more ambitious legal conservatism. An almost exclusive focus on originalism, he suggests, has made the conservative legal movement too narrow, technocratic, and reactive. Merriam argues it has become overly concerned with means, such as the correct rules of constitutional interpretation, instead of ends, like securing the common good. It is too preoccupied with correcting old wrongs, like reversing erroneous precedents, instead of achieving positive results, such as fostering the conditions of a virtuous and orderly society. The scions of legal conservatism, Merriam contends, should learn from the great legal-political movements of the past like the New Deal and the civil rights movement and seek, through legal and political activism, to build the kind of legal order necessary to restore the nation’s traditional political identity.

Merriam concludes his argument by warning that “The future of legal conservatism depends on whether the movement can break its own institutional habits and dare to articulate a new constitutional morality for the demographic and spiritual crises of our age—the crises of belonging, fertility, and meaning—and align jurisprudence with the task of civilizational renewal.” This is probably asking what no legal or political movement can accomplish. Any successful practical undertaking must bear in mind the difference between a laudable ambition, on the one hand, and unrealistic expectations, on the other. Nevertheless, I am sympathetic to the general thrust of Merriam’s pitch, but with certain important qualifications.

He is certainly correct that conservatism must be about more than just conserving the Constitution understood as a written document. Without a positive governing agenda, this project is a loser, both politically and in substance. American voters rightly expect politicians who seek public office to propose something constructive for the government to do—to preserve what is good about our society and improve it where possible. This is the lesson of the repeated failure of mere constitutionalists to capture the nomination of the Republican Party and then win the presidency.

Much of what makes America a good nation is not required by our written Constitution. It is possible, after all, to succeed in getting the Supreme Court to jettison the judicially invented “right” to abortion and still have a nation in which abortion is common because most states permit it. To take another example of current interest, the Constitution permits the federal government to pursue a policy of absolute open borders, on the one hand, or, on the other, to impose a complete ban on any immigration at all. The right kind of immigration policy will promote the common good, and the wrong kind will be ruinous—but the Constitution provides no specific guidance on this question.

Generally speaking, a society that seeks to be healthy, strong, and happy will encourage citizens to develop the traditional virtues, to work in dignified professions, to get married, to have and raise children, to worship God, and to help their communities. Yet we can follow the written Constitution without achieving any of these essential ends. Preservation of the Constitution, then, ought to be understood as a necessary but not sufficient condition of a successful conservative political and legal movement.

A Virtuous Profession

Accordingly, Merriam is also right that a useful legal conservatism needs to focus not only on litigation and adjudication but also on political and legal activism in the service of preserving (or restoring) the essentials of our civilization.

His argument calls to mind Alexis de Tocqueville’s no longer accurate account of the American legal profession in his classic, Democracy in America. Tocqueville found the lawyers of the 19th century to be one of the most naturally conservative elements in American society. The legal profession Tocqueville observed was deeply attached to traditional civilizational standards, and determined to preserve them from the progressive forces unleashed by modern democracy, with its indifference to tradition and form.

Nowadays, many lawyers seem to think of a legal career as a vocation for social transformation. This is a serious problem for America, and the conservative legal movement ought to dedicate thoughtful reflection and resources to correcting it. Fixing this problem, however, cannot be accomplished by litigation—it can only happen by reforming American legal education, which in turn requires that those who pay for such education take an interest in this important question.

I also agree with Merriam that legal conservatism, to the extent that it maintains a necessary focus on judicial appointments, should take an interest in the virtues required to be a good judge besides mere skill in legal interpretation.

Much of the work judges do—work that must be done well in a good society—does not even raise difficult questions of legal interpretation, much less of constitutional meaning. It rather requires judges to use their legitimate legal discretion prudently in the service of a just and orderly society. Obviously, we do not need or want judges who subscribe uncritically to the view that criminal defendants are really the victims of an unjust society. Good judges should be skeptical of all novel legal theories, especially ones presented by activist lawyers trying to change the character of our society. And good judges will be respectful of the rights of all citizens, including criminal defendants and the most unpopular litigants.

Limits of the Judicial Power

Despite my sympathy with Merriam’s critique, the conservative legal movement must maintain its commitment to originalism as the correct—and properly American—approach to constitutional interpretation.

In the first place, originalism is more than just a formal or procedural principle for interpreting the Constitution. It also involves living in continuity with our Founding—a worthy goal that appeals to the moral imagination of conservative voters, and American voters more broadly.

More specifically, originalism is essential to preserving a core aspect of our national identity: self-government under the rule of law. In America, the people govern, but under the limits imposed by the Constitution as our fundamental law. Our freedom as a self-governing people depends on the majority being subject to the Constitution, not to the discretion or will of someone in a political office. The rule of law is not the same thing as rule by judges—even by conservative judges seeking defensible outcomes. Originalism in constitutional interpretation is necessary to ensure that judges are interpreting and applying the law, not inventing it.

Moreover, this judicial discipline of being bound by the original meaning of the Constitution involves the exercise of a virtue that is necessary to safeguarding the moral quality of our civilization: honesty. As a condition of entering into the judicial office, all judges take an oath to uphold the law and the Constitution—and that is all they should be doing. As Alexander Hamilton indicated in The Federalist, the proper execution of the judicial duty requires that “nothing be consulted except the Constitution and the laws.”

For these reasons, the kind of conservative legal movement for which Merriam calls must remain mindful of the proper limits of the judicial power and not give in to the temptation to try to impose outcomes—however desirable they may be—that are not really required by the Constitution.

To take one obvious and important example, a robust legal conservatism will seek to preserve and strengthen the family based on marriage between a man and a woman. In pursuing that aim, it would be proper, among many other necessary steps, to try to get the Supreme Court to reverse its constitutionally groundless holding in Obergefell v. Hodges that the Constitution requires legal recognition of same-sex marriage. A conservative Court would abuse its power, however, if it were to hold that states have no right to recognize same-sex marriage if their voters choose to do so.

As this example indicates, there are limits to what judges can do to preserve or renew civilization in a self-governing society. If a community is so foolish and lacking in elementary respect for justice and its own interests as to eliminate cash bail or to elect prosecutors who give a free pass to certain kinds of crime, there is not much that judges can do about that.

Merriam suggests that civilizational renewal is possible “if there is a will” for it. He is right. And this renewal ought to be the work of a serious conservative legal and political movement.

The post Mere Constitutionalists Are Not Enough appeared first on The American Mind.

Despite thousands of lawsuits against OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma now being settled, the opioid crisis continues to devastate families and communities. This is why there are massive national efforts to expand addiction treatment, develop non-opioid pain alternatives, promote natural remedies, and confront the Mexican drug cartels flooding America with fentanyl. In recent years, opioid-related deaths have finally begun to decline, suggesting those initiatives are starting to make a real impact. But that progress may already be slowing.

The introduction of work requirements for Medicaid eligibility under the One Big Beautiful Bill is producing unintended consequences for people in addiction recovery. Early studies show that declines in Medicaid enrollment correlate with drops in the number of patients receiving treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD). Because Medicaid is the primary source for buprenorphine and addiction services, these enrollment changes threaten fragile but meaningful recovery gains.

Work requirements aren’t the problem—they’re sound policy to preserve the financial stability and original intention of the program. The real issue is Medicaid’s regulatory structure, which is too rigid and dysfunctional to absorb yet another layer of complexity.

This problem has been building for years. Long before work requirements arrived, Medicaid’s regulatory design and state-level policies were already limiting access to effective OUD treatment. Patients have also been facing prior authorization mandates that delay care, restrictive prescriber rules that gatekeep life-changing medications, and certificate-of-need (CON) laws that prevent treatment facilities from opening or expanding. These rules are often created with good intentions—to manage costs, prevent overprescribing, or ensure medical oversight. But in practice, they’ve made it harder for people in recovery to get consistent help.

In states where prescriber limits and facility restrictions already make treatment scarce, adjusting Medicaid eligibility has a serious impact on the availability of buprenorphine providers. The problem lies in creating a policy that requires personal responsibility within an already bureaucratic structure that actively slows treatment access. When enrollment pressures combine with supply constraints caused by CON laws and prescription rules, the result is fewer people getting the care that keeps them alive.

This is especially true in Appalachia, which is ground zero of the opioid crisis. Pennsylvania explicitly prohibits off-site methadone “medication units,” while legislation has been floated in West Virginia that aims to ban methadone clinics. Local governments across the region routinely block zoning permits for treatment facilities, often caving to community pushback rather than addressing a staggering public health emergency. Many states still impose CON laws, restricting the ability of hospitals and clinics to add new treatment beds or open new OUD programs. 

On the provider side, well-intentioned prescribing rules have created even more barriers. Despite a dire shortage of addiction specialists, many states limit the prescription of OUD medications only to certain providers, leaving primary care doctors—who could dramatically expand treatment access—underutilized or prevented from issuing prescriptions. Lawmakers have inadvertently created a bottleneck: too few qualified providers and too many hoops to jump through for those who want to treat addiction.

As the Trump Administration continues building a populist coalition that includes voters from Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other communities deeply scarred by opioid addiction, it must confront this reality head-on. Doing so does not require abandoning conservative principles, nor does it mean reversing work requirements. Those reforms remain both necessary and widely popular. But a serious conservative healthcare agenda must recognize that Medicaid’s regulatory architecture is undermining progress against opioid addiction—and America cannot afford to lose ground now.

The nation has made hard-won gains against opioid misuse in the last few years. Letting regulatory burdens erode that momentum would betray both the moral and political commitments conservatives have made to the working-class communities most harmed by fentanyl.

Conservatives champion individual responsibility—but responsibility also requires ensuring that systems designed to help people reclaim their lives aren’t working against them. Addressing Medicaid’s regulatory failures is not just good policy: it is essential to sustaining progress in one of the most consequential public health fights of our time.

The post How to Win the Opioid Fight appeared first on The American Mind.