Last week, President Trump used the official White House social media account to once again claim that he’d won the 2020 election (“I WON THE ELECTION!”). This time, his declaration stemmed from a seven-page Census Bureau report alleging at least 24,000 noncitizens voted in the 2020 general election (in which 154.6 million Americans voted).

At the risk of indulging the absurd: Trump’s claim isn’t supported. Even if we accept the report’s findings as facts (more on that below), it still doesn’t change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Of the states with the closest margins of victory for Joe Biden: Arizona (10,457 votes), Georgia (11,779), Wisconsin (20,682), Nevada (33,596), the Census report only alleges 1,100 (AZ), 400 (GA), 500 (WI), and 250 (NV) alleged noncitizens. And of course, we know that not every alleged unlawful noncitizen vote went for Biden.

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Yesterday, the Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s request to stay a lower court injunction that had barred the federal government from taking action on Trump’s second executive order from March 2026 (“Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections”).

The internet freaked out, as it is prone to do, both in despair and jubilation (e.g., “Supreme Court upholds Trump EO allowing USPS to withhold ballot sends in states that don’t verify voter rolls,” Jack Posobiec, X post).

But the reality is much more mundane. As stated in the first three sentences of Justice Sotomayor’s dissent:

Today’s decision does not address whether the President’s attempts to interfere with States’ administration of the November 2026 elections are lawful. Nor does it suggest that the Executive Branch has any constitutional or statutory authority to implement the President’s directives. Instead, today’s decision merely postpones adjudication of those challenges. 

As quarterback Aaron Rodgers once told Green Bay Packers fans: “R‑E-L-A‑X.”

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A former aerospace engineer and current homebrewer, Ohioan John Ream wants to distill spirits at home to enjoy with his wife. He would gladly register a still and pay the relevant federal tax, but an 1868 federal law prohibits home distilling. Operating a still in your home—or on a parcel “connected with” it—is a federal felony. Ream sued the government, alleging that this ban violates the Constitution.

The Sixth Circuit upheld the ban as a necessary and proper means of enforcing the federal tax on distilled spirits, thereby breaking with a Fifth Circuit decision issued just 11 days earlier. Cato filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to review Ream’s case and reverse the decision.

Should the government jail people for putting on a drag show or eating a pot brownie? Bill Glod says no. Criticizing “legal moralism” in a July 29 essay for Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org, Glod rejected enacting laws based on “controversial conceptions of the good … that not all people have good reason to endorse.” Less than a week later, Andrew T. Walker published a Daily Wire piece taking, in effect, the opposite position and attacking “drag queen conservatism.” These are recent rounds in a years-long fight on the political right about “postliberalism.” 

Both equate the government taking a moral side with coercion. They’re missing a key distinction offered by the medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas—a likely inspiration for Walker and a boogeyman for Glod. For Aquinas, as for Walker, the law exists to further the common good. But Aquinas believed, as Glod, that the law should leave most private vice unpunished.

When Hamed Kian was charged in Florida with five counts of practicing chiropractic medicine with a suspended license—a felony carrying up to five years in prison—he was tried before a six-person jury. Convicted on all counts by this truncated panel, Mr. Kian appealed, arguing that Florida’s six-person jury rule deprived him of his right to a trial by a twelve-person jury as required by the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Florida appellate court affirmed his conviction without a written opinion, and Mr. Kian asked the US Supreme Court to review his case.

In trying felony cases before six-person juries, Florida’s reliance on the Supreme Court’s 1970 decision in Williams v. Florida breaks from centuries of tradition. The Framers incorporated the common-law criminal jury into Article III and the Sixth Amendment as a vital structural check against government overreach, overzealous prosecution, and judicial bias. While the Constitution’s text does not explicitly specify a numerical requirement, the Court’s recent originalist jurisprudence—most notably in Ramos v. Louisiana—reaffirms that the Sixth Amendment protects the fundamental attributes the criminal jury possessed at common law. Historically, the requirement that a criminal petit jury consist of precisely twelve members remained undisputed in English and American law for hundreds of years until Williams improperly abandoned that historical scope.

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In an essay in The Atlantic titled “In Defense of Flock,” the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman rightly recognizes a foundational principle of criminology: The certainty of apprehension serves as a potent crime deterrent. Yet, in framing automated surveillance as a technological panacea, Lehman ignores the critical trade-off at the heart of a free society. As Benjamin Franklin famously warned: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

To test Lehman’s thesis, one need only apply his logic to his own doorstep. Imagine if the local police department installed a high-resolution pole camera directed squarely at his front door. By his own logic, Lehman should be elated: The camera would deter prospective burglars and, should an intruder ignore it, capture their every movement in crisp detail to ensure swift apprehension.

Cleveland police officers Bailey Gannon and Jennifer Kilnapp responded to a 911 report of a disturbed man with a firearm. Entering a boarding house, they were told by the caller that the man was in a bathroom on the second floor. Gannon opened the bathroom door and, upon seeing the man, fled and blindly fired. One of Gannon’s shots tore through Kilnapp’s arm and lodged in her back, causing lasting physical and psychological damage that ended her police career.

Kilnapp sued Gannon, alleging excessive force. The district court denied Gannon’s motion for judgment on the pleadings based on qualified immunity and a Sixth Circuit panel affirmed. However, a later Sixth Circuit panel vacated and remanded the district court’s denial of summary judgment to Gannon based on qualified immunity. The court held that Gannon seized Kilnapp when he “fired his weapon in circumstances that objectively manifested an intent to restrain” the man in the bathroom. However, the court described this holding as only “largely established” by Supreme Court decisions from 1989 and 2007—but not “crystallized” until a 2021 decision issued after Gannon shot Kilnapp. The court thus held that Gannon was entitled to qualified immunity.

Cato filed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to review and reverse this decision. A legal principle can always be “crystallized” further—but the law was clearly established that shooting someone other than the target is a seizure. The mere contingency of a later decision recognizing that a plaintiff like Kilnapp could seek relief did not make Gannon’s decision to blindly open fire reasonable.