When Richard Hershey stood on a public sidewalk outside the Brookshire Grocery Arena in Bossier City, Louisiana, to hand out pamphlets promoting the Chirstian Vegetarian Association outside a Christian rock concert, he was doing what many generations of Americans have done before him: peacefully exercising his First Amendment rights in a traditional public forum. Yet, local police and arena security officers threatened him with arrest and forced him to leave, even as they left a nearby representative of a commercial radio station entirely unbothered. Seeking justice for this blatant display of viewpoint discrimination, Mr. Hershey filed a federal civil rights lawsuit under a statute commonly known as Section 1983. But rather than vindicate his rights, the federal district court granted the officers qualified immunity, and the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed.

A disclaimer up front: I am not a Russia specialist. I have no particular expertise on the war in Ukraine, and no informed view on whether another round of sanctions on Moscow is necessary, sufficient, or beside the point. 

But I do know something about what happens when Congress hands the executive branch, and President Trump in particular, unilateral and discretionary tariff authority. And the tariff title of the Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026—the long-stalled package championed by the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R‑SC), now backed by the White House and more than two dozen senators—deserves a hard look on those grounds alone.

The bill would authorize the president to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent on the five largest purchasers of Russian crude oil, currently China, India, Slovakia, Hungary, and Azerbaijan, and on the five largest buyers of Russian natural gas, which last year were China, France, Belgium, Japan, and Hungary.

“Two weeks before this year’s primary elections,” according to a recent report, “Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the creation of a tip line for the public to report people or groups suspected of voter fraud.” Oops! “Despite his own warnings, Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years, including in May’s runoff that made him the Republican nominee for U.S. senator, according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.“

Paxton’s campaign responded by calling the report “a baseless, lie-filled tabloid story” and said the candidate “is a registered Texas voter who is in full compliance with state law.” Perhaps it would be most prudent to defer drawing conclusions until after a probe can be completed. When that will happen is uncertain, given that Paxton, as incumbent state attorney general, is himself responsible for conducting any such investigation.

Yesterday, I helped record a Cato video for later release on the subjects of voter fraud and election integrity. While I didn’t bring up the Paxton allegations, I observed that the kind of voter fraud that’s probably committed most often in national elections is the kind carried on by persons with multiple residences who vote from a residence other than the one that the law designates as lawful for that purpose. 

On the night of November 14, 2020, Jacob Settle and his wife, Sophronia Whitehead, left their house to visit a friend. They exited through the back door into their yard, where their truck was parked. The yard was “pitch black” as the house did not have working exterior lights. As the couple prepared to leave, two Escambia County, Florida, police officers arrived to serve a warrant. The record contains conflicting accounts as to (1) what was visible from the backyard, (2) when the officers identified themselves, (3) whether Settle’s truck ever moved, and (4) whether Officer David Collier was even in the path the truck would have traveled when he fatally shot Settle.

In November 2022, Settle’s estate filed suit alleging that Collier violated his Fourth Amendment right to be free from excessive force. The district court denied Collier’s motion for summary judgment, but the Eleventh Circuit reversed based on its improper decision to resolve several factual disputes in lieu of a jury doing so. 

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An editorial note atop Andy Craig’s June 26 article in the UnPopulist, “The Unfortunate Necessity of Court Packing to Stop America’s Authoritarian Drift,” opens with a striking observation: “Desperate times require desperate measures.” That aphorism is ancient: it dates back to Hippocrates’s precept that very sick patients require aggressive treatment. Its wisdom has traveled through centuries: in Hamlet, King Claudius explains that “Diseases desperate grown / By desperate appliance are relieved, / Or not at all.” Craig’s article diagnoses a social pathology; he prescribes adding four new Justices to the Supreme Court. He concedes that court packing will be very hard on the patient but explains that “sometimes a smaller harm is necessary to avoid a far bigger one.” 

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Number 27 in our series of occasional roundups on election law and policy, focusing this time on issues of electoral reform that will endure beyond the midterm battles of the moment:

• Reform failure: One reason reaction has been muted to the Supreme Court’s new decision in NRSC v. FEC, striking down limits on party coordination of spending with candidates, is that many close observers on the left and center agreed that the existing rules were counterproductive [Samuel Issacharoff, NYU Law Democracy Project (calling ruling a “welcome correction” and citing what “Pam Karlan and I have called the hydraulics of campaign finance regulation: money under pressure does not disappear, it finds the path of least resistance”); Richard Pildes, Rick Hasen]. 
• “In my view, there are plausible policy reasons to specify that all ballots should be in hand, not simply in the mail, by Election Day. But the Supreme Court was not presented today with that, or any, policy question” [my statement on the Supreme Court’s Watson v. RNC for Cato, together with Stephen Richer’s statement]. More from me: Maintaining accurate and up-to-date voter rolls should be ranked as a real reform priority, and Maryland is falling short [Free State Notes; also, why Maryland’s recent primary mail ballot foul-up didn’t pose a practical integrity issue, though it was embarrassing and confused voters (Alexander Shur, Votebeat; Christine Condon, Maryland Matters)]. 
• “Report: ‘Understanding How Proportional Representation Might Work in New York City’ ” [Jack Santucci (and John Ketcham}]; Discontent with California’s top-two system contributing to interest in multiparty options [Dennis Lytton, Liberal Currents]; Rob Richie discusses the proportional-ish voting method known as cumulative voting, as well as the promise of ranked-choice balloting in presidential primaries [Expand Democracy]; A caution from the Netherlands on the difficulties of national coalition formation under proportional representation [Tarunabh Khaitan and Mike Winterwerp, Social Europe]. 
• I and others have generally praised as admirable the Nebraska–Maine approach of divvying up a state’s electoral votes based on congressional district. But what if it has a dark sibling that would enable a state to use gerrymandered districts to hand most or even all of its electoral votes to a candidate who loses its popular vote? [Henry Noyes, Marquette Law Review via Electoral Law Blog]
• Reformers of an earlier day structured the Federal Election Commission so appointees from no one party could control it, which made for either partisan fairness or a kludgy guarantee of ineffectiveness, depending on who you ask. Will that structure survive the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Slaughter? [Bob Bauer, Executive Functions] 
• Meaningful representation of coherent geographical areas in national election processes seems to be less and less valued as time goes on, as witnessed by both the race to the bottom on gerrymandering and the continued momentum behind the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact electoral vote deal [Philip Wallach, American Enterprise Institute, with a discussion of “general ticket voting,” banned since the Apportionment Act of 1842, which was designed to award the party that won overall in a state its entire House delegation]. 

The US government operates on a division of labor: the legislature makes law, the executive implements law, and the judiciary interprets law. Two years ago, in Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court definitively rejected agencies’ appropriation of the power to interpret ambiguous statutes. Here, the Cato Institute filed an amicus brief asking the Court to reject agencies’ appropriation of the power to interpret ambiguous regulations. Allowing agencies to wield both the power to make law and the power to interpret it violates the separation of powers, encourages agencies to make bad rules, and displaces traditional legal rules.

Petitioner Kendrick Jarrell Beaird entered a guilty plea to a single count of felon-in-possession of a firearm. He faced an enhanced sentence for possessing a “large capacity magazine.” This finding was based on the district court’s deference to US Sentencing Guidelines commentary, which defined “large capacity magazine” as any magazine that accepts more than 15 bullets of ammunition. 

The Supreme Court has held that because the US Sentencing Commission “drafts the guidelines as well as the commentary interpreting them,” the latter should receive the deference afforded to an agency when interpreting its own regulations. This means an agency’s interpretation becomes the “ultimate criterion” for what an agency’s own regulation means.

Such deference gives agencies both the power to make the law and to determine what the law means, collapsing the Constitution’s careful division of powers. It also encourages them to write regulations poorly and then come up with convenient post hoc interpretations. This deference is uniquely dangerous in the hands of the Sentencing Commission, given how insulated it is from public pressure and political accountability. 

Damage to the coherence of the law as a whole has come as deference to agencies replaces core legal principles—such as the rule of lenity—with regulators’ own glosses. The Court should end agency deference and send Mr. Beaird’s case back for further proceedings.