The Dershowitz theory, outlined in his new book “The Preventive State,” is simple. Forward-looking government policies or actions should be informed by balancing the risks of harm from false positives against the risk of harm from false negatives. Consider preemptive wars. They are professedly based on hunches that the enemy will attack, occupy or conquer at some future time unless the enemy is obliterated.

Preemptive wars risk false positives. It may lead to gratuitous wars because the enemy would not have attacked even if not obliterated. It also risks false negatives. Preemptive wars may be foregone by understating the risk of an enemy attack that occurs. Dershowitz argues that the risk of harm from false positives should be balanced against the risk of harm from false negatives in deciding whether to initiate preemptive warfare. He assumes the balancing would be a simple and speedy AI calculation.

The Dershowitz theory does not compute because the government invariably manipulates projections about future harm for ulterior partisan or personal motives. Manipulation is shielded from public or congressional scrutiny by routine bogus claims of executive privilege or state secrets. Truth surfaces, if at all, decades later, when secrets may be declassified too late to redress the stupendous harm in the interim.

National security lies are the norm, not the exception. President Harry Truman dismissed the Korean War as a “police action” but argued the war was necessary to deter the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe. The Korean War risked a nuclear attack on China, urged by General Douglas MacArthur. There is no evidence that the Soviet Union planned an invasion of Western Europe.

The Vietnam War was fueled by the government’s fanciful “domino theory” that if Vietnam fell into the communist sphere, then communism would spread worldwide to crush Western civilization, and lies about a second torpedo attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Pentagon Papers revealed serial government lies about the progress of the Vietnam War. It endured not because it was winnable but because President Lyndon B. Johnson was politically adamant about not losing a war on his watch like President Truman’s alleged loss of China, which was politically crippling.

“I am not going to lose Vietnam,” President Johnson told the ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., two days after assuming office. “I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”

The Vietnam War was lost after squandering more than $1 trillion in current dollars, and suffering more than 55,000 American military deaths, millions of Vietnamese casualties, the My Lai massacre, napalm girl and countless other atrocities. The world did not fall to communism. Indeed, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Vietnam is now a semi-ally of the United States against China.

It would seem the Dershowitz thesis would clearly have militated against the Vietnam War. But not so fast. Advocates can postulate that, absent the resolve of the United States to fight in Vietnam, even in a losing cause, the Soviet Union and China would have been emboldened to invade and conquer America, Western Europe and Japan, writing an epitaph for freedom. Such fevered speculation cannot be disproved like a mathematical theorem.

Abraham Lincoln exposed the uselessness of the Dershowitz theory to check gratuitous, calamitous, preemptive wars in a letter to law partner William H. Herndon explaining his opposition to the Mexican-American War born of President James K. Polk’s lies:

“Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If today he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us;’ but he will say to you, ‘Be silent: I see it, if you don’t.'”

The Dershowitz theory of preventive harm presumes intellectual integrity in the corridors of powers that has long passed from the scene — assuming it ever existed. It is divorced from the lamp of experience. In politics, everything is subordinated to power. Truth is a handicap. Remember President Donald Trump to Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 1, 2021: “You’re too honest.” Mr. Trump is in the White House. Mr. Pence is nowhere.

Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.” His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com and X feed is @brucefeinesq.

Biographer Sam Tanenhaus has written a meticulous, tome-like biography of Buckley. He vastly overstates Buckley’s influence on America. He asserts or implies Buckley engineered a “revolution” of the magnitude of the American Declaration of Independence or the storming of the Bastille.

To the contrary, since Buckley’s comet began to soar in 1951 with the release of his first book, “God and Man at Yale,” the U.S. government has steadily grown into a mighty oak — from a republic that glorified liberty and the march of the mind to an empire that exalts the armored knight and world domination.

The growth has been fueled by chronic, unconstitutional presidential wars, a global projection of military power featuring 800 military bases abroad, defense pacts superfluous to national security, dragnet spying on the “not-yet-guilty,” a national debt galloping past $36 trillion boosted by chronic trillion-dollar budget deficits, and hundreds of thousands of federal regulations entering every nook and cranny of business and private life. The more political personalities changed during Buckley’s lifetime, the more the federal Leviathan grew year after year. The national debt tripled on President Ronald Reagan’s watch.

Buckley was intellectually at war with himself. On the one hand, he preached government frugality and limited government. On the other hand, he saluted a multitrillion-dollar warfare state to fight a vastly inflated global communist threat. He was clueless of James Madison’s wisdom: “The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” The surveillance state that has destroyed privacy and the Fourth Amendment right to be let alone was fueled by Buckley’s fevered anti-communist zeal.

He served as a CIA officer in the early 1950s, years when the agency orchestrated the overthrows of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in favor of the cruel, corrupt Shah Mohammad Pahlavi, and of Guatemala’s President Jacobo Arbenz in favor of genocidal military dictators.

Buckley voiced no opposition to President Harry Truman’s unconstitutional war in Korea, which the latter dismissed as a “police action.” The war featured 3 million casualties and the threat of nuclear war urged by General Douglas MacArthur. Buckley voiced no opposition to NATO, the first United States defense treaty in 160 years. NATO contradicted President George Washington’s Farewell Address warning against “entangling alliances” and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams’ admonition against going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Buckley was heedless of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s profound concern over a military-industrial complex pushing the nation into gratuitous wars for ulterior motives, i.e., money and power.

He bugled for the disastrous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the ill-fated Vietnam War. He defended the Bay of Pigs fiasco to overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the 2003 criminal war of aggression against Iraq (which made Iran a regional hegemon) resting on President Saddam Hussein’s imaginary WMDs. He voiced no objection to CIA assassination attempts against Castro, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, or the shocking intelligence agency abuses exposed by the 1975 Senate Church Committee.

Buckley became part of the glitterati through National Review magazine, a syndicated newspaper column, On The Right, the widely acclaimed television show “Firing Line,” and endless speaking engagements. He was an intellectual entertainer more than a political philosopher. He relished creature comforts and amusements. He was not free from narcissism. His wife Patricia and son Christopher make but fleeting appearances in Tanenhaus’ magnus opus like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in “Hamlet.”

The man was gifted, gracious, often generous and seldom mean-spirited. But only a tiny handful of the greatest leave footprints on the sands of time. Buckley did not make the grade.

Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.” His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com and X feed is @brucefeinesq.

Consider the following hypothetical. President Donald Trump issues an executive order stripping every MAGA detractor of United States citizenship and ordering their summary deportation to El Salvador. A detractor races to a United States district court seeking an injunction against the patently unconstitutional order. According to Trump v. CASA, Inc., the district court would be powerless to enjoin President Trump from enforcing the executive order against anyone but the single plaintiff.

Everyone else would be fair game to strip of citizenship and deport without a hearing. Tens of millions of lawsuits would be needed by MAGA critics to end President Trump’s wrecking ball against due process and Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment. If you had neither the time nor resources to retain an attorney to file immediate suit, you might be rotting in an El Salvador dungeon before judicial relief might be forthcoming. And we know Mr. Trump’s stance regarding the return of illegally deported citizens or aliens: He is helpless against Central America’s superpower El Salvador!

Trump v. CASA, Inc. is too close to the hypothetical for comfort. On Jan. 20, President Trump issued a preposterous executive order reinterpreting the plain language of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, to deny birthright citizenship to individuals born in the United States and bound to obey its laws, provided their mothers were not lawfully present or were here temporarily and their fathers were neither citizens nor permanent resident aliens. The text is plain even to kindergarteners: “All persons born … in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

In the 157 years that elapsed since ratification of the amendment and 2025, virtually everyone in the United States understood Section 1 to mean what it says: If you are born in the United States and subject to its laws, you are a citizen. The United States Supreme Court, for example, declared in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), “The Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory.” It added that the “subject to the jurisdiction” qualifier excludes only “children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation, and children of diplomatic representatives of a foreign state.”

Mr. Trump’s executive order absurdly maintained that individuals born of disqualifying parents “are not subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, effectively meaning they could commit murder, rape, arson, theft, assault or other violent felonies with impunity. That terrifying consequence alone is sufficient to discredit the executive order. It also wars with itself. It applies only to persons born within the United States after 30 days of its issuance. People born of disqualifying parents before that day remain citizens. But Section 1 applies to both categories of individuals. It can’t mean one thing on Jan. 20, 2025, and another thing 30 days later without an amendment — except in the fantasy world of Humpty Dumpty in “Through The Looking-Glass”: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

Federal district courts in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington issued preliminary, nationwide injunctions against enforcement of the flagrantly unconstitutional executive order on behalf of pregnant women whose children would be disqualified as citizens of the United States, two immigrant-rights organizations sporting thousands of members likely to give birth to children who would be similarly disqualified, and 22 states, the District of Columbia and San Francisco. The injunctions prohibited the Trump administration from applying the executive order to any individual or entity. They pivoted on a pure question of law interpreting Section 1 as applied to any person born in the United States to disqualifying parents.

Limiting the injunctions to the named parties before the district courts would have invited thousands or tens of thousands of copycat lawsuits raising the same constitutional issue that had already been decided. And before these lawsuits could be filed, the Trump administration could have attempted to deport the non-parties to El Salvador, South Sudan, Zimbabwe or anywhere else on the planet with little or no chance of returning to the United States for years if ever.

If the Trump administration thought the district court orders had errantly interpreted birthright citizenship, it could have leapfrogged over courts of appeals to the Supreme Court for a speedy, definitive constitutional interpretation under Rule 11 of the Supreme Court. That process was used to address President Harry S. Truman’s seizure of steel mills during the Korean War (Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer) and President Richard Nixon’s obligation to surrender White House tapes for use in Watergate cover-up trials (United States v. Nixon).

But President Trump did not take that route, knowing he would lose on the merits before the court. Instead, Trump nitpicked the scope of the district court’s injunctions to non-parties to keep his executive order on life support to terrify immigrants and placate his MAGA base for additional months of protracted litigation. Indeed, President Trump will probably never appeal his executive order losses in lower courts to avoid the embarrassment of losing in the Supreme Court populated with three Trump appointees.

The court should have sustained nationwide injunctions against flagrantly unconstitutional executive orders like Mr. Trump’s regarding birthright citizenship to arrest extraconstitutional, irreparable injuries inflicted on non-parties to litigation. Instead, the majority permitted Mr. Trump to play them like a fiddle.

Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.” His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com and X feed is @brucefeinesq.

Since its establishment by the 1947 National Security Act, the agency’s intelligence collection, analysis and foresight have proven inferior to that of The New York Times at a tiny fraction of the cost. Three examples among many: The CIA failed to foresee the Chinese intervention in the Korean War with 3 million soldiers; it failed to predict the dissolution of the Soviet empire under Mikhail Gorbachev; and it insisted with “slam dunk” certainty that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 invasion. The mastermind behind covert action, Frank Wisner, never paused to consider that his cure for defeating an imaginary worldwide communist conspiracy was worse than the disease. Nothing the CIA has done since its birth has materially influenced the course of history for the better. Elon Musk’s downsizing of the agency will not be felt.

Shakespeare’s Mark Antony famously remarked in “Julius Caesar,” “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” So it was with the CIA’s zealous, egotistical pioneer Wisner. He captained the agency’s mindless, gratuitous covert actions from 1948 to 1958 tilting at windmills before succumbing to mental illness and eventually suicide. Wisner planted the seeds of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini and brutal mullah successors. Wisner was responsible for the military dictatorships and genocide in Guatemala that predictably emerged after his orchestration of the CIA’s overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz.

Why were the United States and Wisner meddling in the affairs of Iran and Guatemala, both irrelevant to the national defense? President George Washington’s Farewell Address warned of the folly of projecting the profile of the United States beyond invincible self-defense: “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.” Influence abroad by example is our optimal foreign policy. As Secretary of State John Quincy Adams elaborated in his July 4, 1821, address to Congress, seeking to make the world safe for democracy at the end of bayonets would destroy liberty and the rule of law at home:

“She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force…

She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit…”

In “The Determined Spy,” the author shies from asking “why” or “to what purpose” in examining Wisner’s career, such as dispatching hundreds to their deaths in Albania to unhorse dictator Enver Hoxha who was clueless as to how to manufacture a vacuum cleaner. In the aftermath of World War II and the rebirth of the inflated communist scare and domino theory born with the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, Wisner conceived the Soviet Union, its satellites in Eastern and Central Europe, and any country that resisted bowing to United States hegemony as existential threats. Aping the Roman Empire, the United States engaged in armageddon-like struggles everywhere. No middle ground or neutrality would be tolerated, anticipating President George W. Bush’s belligerence after 9/11: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

Among other things, Wisner spearheaded the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in favor of the unpopular, brutal, corrupt, vacillating, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlevi. Replacing democracy with dictatorship was professedly justified by the absurd theory that Mossadegh was a crypto-communist since he refused to be a tool of the British Empire. His cardinal sin was nationalizing (not expropriating) the hugely profitable Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951 which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill postulated was integral to the British Navy.

Frank Wisner is heroized by the CIA along with legendary Allan Dulles, “Beetle” Smith, and William Donovan. The mystery is “why?” Wisner was an excitable workaholic, like a squirrel pointlessly leaping in all directions. After perusing author Waller’s tome, the reader is left wondering, what was the overriding motivation in Wisner’s life? His wife Polly proffered the pedestrian answer in remarking to Katherine Graham, wife of Phil Graham, then-publisher of
The Washington Post: Their husbands could not “have borne life as kind of doing nothing. They just could not bear not being in the center” of the country’s affairs.

Such is the case when it comes to journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” which provides a ringside seat to the egotistical, megalomaniacal calculations and maneuvers of the candidates and supporting actors in the 2024 presidential campaign. There are no surprise O. Henry endings. All the players corroborate a truism: Politics attracts deformed personalities featuring an insatiable lust of power for the sake of power to fuel self-esteem.

Among other things, when the 2024 campaign ended, President Joe Biden and candidate Kamala Harris were estranged from former President Barack Obama.  Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was despised by first lady Jill Biden and was semi-alienated from Harris. Campaign staff were constantly at loggerheads vying for personal prominence and power. There were no “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” protagonists.

The nimbly paced narrative, however, is devoid of intellectual content. None of the actors voice alarm that the United States Constitution is ablaze, like passengers on the Titanic competing for a first-class berth while ignoring the iceberg.

The battle for the White House has become more ruthless because constitutional powers have concentrated in the presidency by usurpation or congressional abdication while the federal government has grown like bamboo over the past century or more. To be president is to occupy the most powerful position in the history of the world: a military spanning the globe and the skies, dragnet surveillance with dossiers on the entire population, regulatory authority to make or break any business enterprise with the stroke of a pen and an annual budget soaring past $7 trillion to employ as a weapon to assist friends and destroy enemies.

Power attracts depravity. Absolute power attracts absolute depravity. Earthbound Benjamin Franklin at the constitutional convention, drawing on his long experience mingling with the political classes of Britain, France and the United States, warned:

“There are two passions which have a powerful influence on the affairs of men. These are ambition and avarice; the love of power, and the love of money. Separately, each of these has great force in prompting men to action; but when united in view of the same object, they have in many minds the most violent effects. Place before the eyes of such men a post of honor, that shall be at the same time a place of profit, and they will move heaven and earth to obtain it … It will not be the wise and moderate, the lovers of peace and good order, the men fittest for the trust. It will be the bold and the violent, the men of strong passions and indefatigable activity in their selfish pursuits. These will thrust themselves into your government, and be your rulers.”

Contrary to the Constitution’s separation of powers — a structural bill of rights to defend liberty and forestall tyranny — the president has metamorphosed since the Spanish-American War of 1898 into an extraconstitutional king. The president has usurped the war power from Congress. The president has usurped the treaty power from the Senate by calling treaties executive agreements. Congress has surrendered its legislative power to the president, including the power of the purse, with limitless delegations and acquiescence to presidential refusals to faithfully execute the laws — indistinguishable from an unconstitutional presidential repeal of a duly enacted statute.

Congress enacted the National Emergencies Act of 1976 without defining “national emergency.” President Donald Trump declared a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to throw the world economy into turmoil with stratospheric tariffs. Other countries, including China, have predictably retaliated. We risk a reprise of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 which fueled the Great Depression.

The president operates a secret government shielded from congressional oversight under the banner of state secrets or executive privilege. Elon Musk, who has been neither elected to any office nor confirmed by the Senate to any appointed position, has turned the federal government upside-down (doing the work of Congress) with zero oversight. Members are terrified that Mr. Musk might support a primary opponent and require them to work for reelection rather than coast to victory in gerrymandered districts.

Presidents fought an undeclared war against Afghanistan for two decades costing $2.3 trillion on a fool’s errand concluding in a defeat by the Taliban. Not a single official responsible for this stupendous misadventure paid a price, which guarantees repetition. We are witnessing the same in President Trump’s continuing gratuitous, unconstitutional presidential war against the Houthis, a war that was begun in violation of the Constitution’s Declare War Clause under President Barack Obama.

We are sleepwalking to self-ruination by abandoning the miracle at Philadelphia that gave birth to the Constitution. That is the urgent story that authors Allen and Parnes ignored. They are not alone.

Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.” His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com and X feed is @brucefeinesq.

The Arab Spring was a turning point in history that didn’t turn. Unity in opposition to dictatorship is pushing water downhill. Unity in support of a change in power is a high-wire act where the formerly oppressed maneuver to become oppressors.

Beginning in 2011, the Arab Spring featured uprisings against established dictatorial orders in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Syria and Bahrain. It was sparked by the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor to protest police corruption and abuses. Tunisian dictator Ben Ali was overthrown. Dictatorships in Libya, Egypt and Yemen soon tumbled. Syria’s dictator Bashar Assad was ousted last December. With military support from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain’s Sunni dictator Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa survived a Shiite insurrection.

But the more things changed in the Arab world, the more they stayed the same: dictatorships with new faces. In Tunisia, President Kais Saied has notoriously imprisoned political opponents, destroying the judiciary, and diminished parliament to an ink blot.

In Egypt, President Abdal Fattah el-Sisi has made freedom of speech and assembly felonious and corruption the coin of the realm.

In Libya, dictators rule in Tripoli and Benghazi, with multiple regional warlords in the background. In Yemen, civil war rages between Shiite Houthis and multiple Sunni opponents commonly at war with themselves. In Syria, internecine warfare has already emerged between Kurds in the northeast, former President Assad’s Alawite sect, and transitional President Ahmad al-Sharaa, who led the organization HTS, which the United States designated a terrorist group. Israel, which occupies huge swathes of southern Syria, will promote endless civil war for its own interests, keeping Syria in convulsions indefinitely. Alawites and Christians have already been slaughtered. The United States should stay away from the hecatomb, not because we are indifferent to human misery, but because any cure would be worse than the disease, as it proved in Vietnam and more recently in Afghanistan.

The DNA of the species is unalterable. Societies instinctively gravitate toward monarchy or its equivalent. Think of the Bible or the Quran. Humans crave a singular leader who will give them a blueprint to enter heaven and relieve them of moral responsibility for their destiny.

This gravitational pull can be resisted only by an educated public informed and thrilled by the cerebral faculties and acutely alert to the depravity of human nature that can only be domesticated by separation of powers pitting ambition against ambition — political sociopaths against political sociopaths. The miracle in Philadelphia in the United States that gave birth to the Constitution was the abandonment of our species’ narcissism and the acknowledgment that we need institutional guardrails to avoid destroying ourselves through constant warfare and upheavals.

The unschooled elevate personalities over institutions and juvenile amusements — having fun — over the quest to diminish injustice, to strive for wisdom, to display courage and to be guided by every benevolent instinct of the human heart. As Thomas Jefferson admonished, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

Not a single Arab Spring nation today salutes the thinker over the armored knight, critical thinking over unthinking obedience. Separation of powers is nowhere to be found. They lack the building blocks for government by the consent of the governed to secure unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. No outside force can summon these building blocks into being.

This is not a call for isolationism. We trade. We exchange ambassadors. We respond if asked for advice in building a democracy. And we influence by example. The American Declaration of Independence and Constitution frightened monarchies and despots around the world without a single bullet or gunboat.

Vice President JD Vance, an echo chamber of Trump’s rhetoric, commented in 2021 that Trump, if reelected, should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, [and] every civil servant in the administrative state … and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” The vice president recently reaffirmed that view in an interview with Politico.

President Trump himself has summoned words attributed to Napoleon, “He who saves the country does not violate any law,” reminiscent of the Richard Nixon-David Frost exchange, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Trump added on Truth Social, after revoking federal approval of New York’s congestion pricing program, “LONG LIVE THE KING,” a variation of French King Louis XIV’s boast, “I am the state.” Elon Musk, Trump’s kingmaker, thundered against judicial checks against the President’s agenda, “There needs to be an immediate wave of judicial impeachments, not just one.”

Since the birth of the nation, it has been the province and duty of the judicial branch to say what the law is. The “king can do no wrong” doctrine of the British Empire was dethroned by the American Revolution. Indeed, Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution saddles the president with an obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Its ancestor was the English Bill of Rights of 1689, which declared, “The pretended power of suspending the laws or the execution of laws by regal authority without consent of Parliament is illegal.”

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist effused that judicial review — the power of the Supreme Court to hold acts of the political branches unconstitutional without force or effect — was one of “the crown jewels” of the Constitution. The president is required by Article II Section 3 to enforce orders of the Supreme Court or subordinate federal tribunals. Thus, President Dwight D. Eisenhower dispatched 1,000 U.S. Army paratroopers to Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 to enforce desegregation at Central High School mandated by Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Similarly, President John F. Kennedy sent federal troops to the University of Mississippi in 1962 to protect black enrollee James Meredith from violent white mobs.

The president cannot be the final judge of his constitutional authorities. It has been recognized for more than four centuries of Anglo-American jurisprudence that a person cannot be a judge in his own case. To the Supreme Court is entrusted the final word not because it is infallible but because the nine justices are vastly more likely than the president or Congress to decide the question without ulterior political motives. They are appointed, not elected. They serve for life with protection against lessened compensation. And they represent a healthy diversity of backgrounds and philosophies.

No president has disobeyed a Supreme Court order. Vance’s allusion to President Andrew Jackson is incomplete. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the court voided the convictions of two missionaries for failing to obtain licenses from the State of Georgia to reside in Cherokee County. Chief Justice John Marshall relied on the plenary constitutional power of the federal government over Indian affairs. Skirmishing over compliance with the order became moot when the governor of Georgia granted the missionaries pardons in exchange for dropping their constitutional challenge. President Jackson reportedly smirked, “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.” But the president soon changed his tune when South Carolina claimed authority to nullify federal tariffs.

The Civil War case of Ex Parte Merryman (1861) is also not on point. There, a federal circuit court held that President Abraham Lincoln was powerless to suspend the writ of habeas corpus because the Constitution entrusted the suspension power exclusively to Congress. Lincoln declined to follow the court order and reported the matter to Congress. It retroactively ratified the president’s suspension of the Great Writ in the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act of March 3, 1863.

During the Watergate investigation, President Richard Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox over enforcement of a grand jury subpoena for incriminating White House tapes upheld in Nixon v. Sirica (1973). The firing precipitated the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus in the “Saturday Night Massacre.” Awakened to the peril to the Constitution, Americans protested with 30,000 telegrams streaming into Washington daily. Nixon backed down, complied with the court order and appointed Leon Jaworski to succeed Cox. The rule of law triumphed.

More than 50 years later, the duumvirate of Trump and Musk are responding with veiled fists to the federal judiciary for halting their counterrevolution against the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Last month, the Supreme Court refused to disturb a temporary restraining order against the duo’s without-cause removal of the special counsel of the Office of Special Counsel.

A head-on collision between the duumvirate and federal courts up to the Supreme Court is approaching. Then, as during Watergate, whether we remain a government of laws as opposed to a government of men will be up to Congress through impeachment and up to the American people through their voices.

Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.” His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com and X feed is @brucefeinesq.

Contrary to former President Joe Biden, our co-belligerency is not to make Ukraine safe for democracy. Ukraine has never embraced democracy or the rule of law. Corruption is ubiquitous. Free speech and association are strangled. Minorities enjoy little breathing space. Ukraine’s George Washington, Stepan Bandera, was a Nazi collaborator or semi-collaborator.

The United States uses money and advisers to influence Ukrainian politics in a manner that we find intolerable when a foreign country interferes in our elections. Former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland played impresario in the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.

Neither is the United States a co-belligerent with Ukraine to protect the sanctity of international borders. We readily accepted new borders in post-Tito Yugoslavia and employed force to secure Kosovo’s independence from Serbia.

The truth about our involvement in Ukraine to oppose Russia is obscene. We are involved not to defeat Russia and bring Ukraine into NATO. Indeed, the United States is adamantly opposed to the latter. Our goal is to bleed Russia dry with Ukrainian soldiers and sacrifices heedless of the industrial-scale suffering inflicted on the Ukrainian people. We do not wish Ukraine to approach victory because that might provoke Russian President Vladimir Putin to unleash nuclear weapons. That explains our handcuffs on Ukraine’s use of American weapons. But we also do not want Ukraine to lose the war because the hemorrhaging of Russia would cease.

Ponder this moronic contradiction. We are assisting Ukraine militarily to defend its right to seek NATO admission. At the same time, we are blocking Ukraine’s admission for fear it would precipitate Russian adventurism.

But none of what Horton chronicles is surprising. Reflect on a false dawn more than three decades ago.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The victory of the United States in the Cold War. The end of history, according to professed savant and clairvoyant Francis Fukuyama. Heaven on earth had arrived with the fulfillment of the Book of Isaiah, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

These hopes and expectations betrayed the innocence of ingenues. They defied the depravity of human nature that finds expression in the iron law of international relations: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” as the historian Thucydides related. This unstarry-eyed chronicler of human affairs wrote not for the moment, but for the ages. He elaborated:

“I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time … Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.”

The species is fueled by hormonal, not cerebral gratifications. By far the strongest is the insatiable craving for power for its own sake. Power confers a juvenile sense of self-esteem to fill philosophically empty souls. It is intoxicating and self-ruinous. Think of Napoleon’s blunder in marching to Moscow in winter, Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, the United States in Vietnam, Iraq and Libya, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The Sermon on the Mount, with all its grandeur and divine nobility of heart, has proved futile in diminishing the lust and gratification of raw power.

The end of the Cold War predictably proved an intermezzo before the United States embarked on Cold War 2.0. In mindlessly seeking to rule wherever it can, the United States orchestrated the expansion of NATO to 32 members opposed to Russia as it was reduced to a shadow of the Soviet Empire. The expansion was not to strengthen the security of the United States from attack. Who believes that Montenegro, North Macedonia, Finland or Sweden (the latest NATO members) are in the calculus of any would-be aggressor against the United States? The expansion was in hopes of overthrowing Putin, by force and violence if necessary, in the fantasy that we could make peace and democracy bloom there if only given a chance.

The United States is racing toward self-ruination like all prior empires. There is only one guardrail: restoring the Constitution’s separation of powers which entrusts the war power exclusively in Congress with no incentive to exercise it except in self-defense. The wise words of Senator Henry Clay in opposing U.S. intervention in Hungary against Russia would become our gospel:

“Far better is it for ourselves and the cause of liberty, that, adhering to our wise pacific system, and avoiding distant wars of Europe, we should keep our lamp burning brightly on this western shore as a light to all nations, than to hazard its utter extinction amid the ruins of fallen or falling republics in Europe.”

The United States was born welcoming immigrants. By self-selection, they are disproportionately courageous, ambitious and entrepreneurial. A major colonial grievance against King George III justifying the American Revolution was his “obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners [and] refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither.”

George Washington, in his General Orders to the Continental Army issued at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, explained that America was founded to create “an Asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations and religions.” He repeated in addressing newly arrived Irish immigrants that “the bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions.” Washington anticipated by a century the Statue of Liberty adorned by Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus”: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Washington’s views were mainstream. Similar sentiments were voiced by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, father of the Constitution, and James Wilson, delegate to the Constitutional Convention and later justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The constitutionally enumerated powers of Congress include establishing a “uniform rule of naturalization” but not restrictions on immigration. Both Madison and Jefferson assailed the Alien Friends Act of 1798 empowering the president to deport aliens deemed “dangerous” as unconstitutional. Not a single alien was deported under the act. It expired in 1801.

Immigration remained generally free for a century as the nation grew from a tiny acorn into a mighty oak. Xenophobia and racism then surfaced with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 fueled by labor opposition to Chinese migrants working on the transcontinental railroad.

The Founding Fathers championed open borders because they understood that America is an idea, not a race, religion or tribe. Any individual who subscribes to the Constitution; who believes in unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; who believes that justice is the end of government and of civil society; who treasures the right of individuals to march to their own drummers free of domestic predation or foreign aggression; who revels in the knowledge that they are masters of their fate, captains of their soul; and who is willing to risk and give that last full measure of devotion to defend and preserve these principals is an American.

This idea found partial expression in Washington’s 1790 letter to a Hebrew congregation in Newport, Rhode Island: “For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

The Parable of the Good Samaritan and a score of biblical passages teach the duty of generosity toward strangers and foreigners. Leviticus 19: 33-34 instructs, “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land … you shall treat the stranger … as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

In the 2024 presidential election, however, the American people voted against the American Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers, the Constitution and the Statue of Liberty. They voted against immigrants, whether they entered by parole, were given temporary protected status, overstayed their visas, qualified for asylum or entered illegally through the southern border. The incidence of crime, welfare or unemployment among immigrants is lower than that of homegrown Americans. Many immigrants pay into Social Security but receive nothing. They are not saints. Some do commit serious crimes and should be prosecuted, punished and deported accordingly.

That’s not to say the idea of America should not be protected and kept fresh and shining. Immigrants and citizens alike of all ages should be required to pass a constitutional literacy test to maintain a distinct American culture to which all alternatives should be subservient. This is our deliverance from mediocrity and indolence — our greatest national security threat.

Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.” His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com and X feed is @brucefeinesq.

The first Civil Rights Movement addressed racial oppression where the choice between right and wrong was clear. Pervasive segregation. Wholesale disenfranchisement in violation of the 15th Amendment. The firehoses of Commissioner Bull Connor and the cattle prods of Sheriff Jim Clark. The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four angelic girls. The cold-blooded murders of Emmett Till, Michael Schwerner, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman and Medgar Evers and others who gave that last full measure of devotion to a noble cause.

Equal justice under law was invincible. The electrifying words are enshrined over the entrance of the United States Supreme Court. As the late Justice Antonin Scalia expressed: “In the eyes of the government, we are just one race here. It is American.”

Success for the movement was simple to measure: treating individuals with colorblindness in all walks of life. Designating the race of candidates on ballots, for example, was verboten to discourage racial bloc voting. A post-racial society approached with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the 1968 Fair Housing Act, the judicial revival of post-Civil War civil rights laws and Thurgood Marshall’s elevation to the Supreme Court. In such a society, when individuals look at one another, they see only two things: character and accomplishments. Race is ignored.

A post-racial society does not yield perfect justice. That benchmark is unattainable because mankind is made of crooked timber, and our station in life is influenced by happenstances beyond our control — our parents, siblings, relatives and place of birth. But a post-racial society is optimal. Free will makes us captains of our fate, masters of our souls. Skeptics who insist we are in bondage to our circumstances have no response to British sage Samuel Johnson’s apercu: “All theory is against free will; all experience is for it.”

Instead of running victory laps, however, the first Civil Rights Movement segued into the second Civil Rights Movement, which has sputtered. The focus shifted from individual rights to group quotas or entitlements divorced from individual merit. The two are in tension if not contradictory. Author Williams implicitly elides the distinction. He regularly summons statistics demonstrating the underrepresentation of Black Americans in professions, politics and elite educational institutions and overrepresentation in crime, drug abuse, prisons or homelessness as disproof of a post-racial society. Williams’ unstated assumption is that in a post-racial society, by every metric of success or failure, Black and white people would be represented in exact proportion to their representation in the total population.

That argument is unconvincing. Renowned Black scholar Thomas Sowell has written volumes discrediting the theory. Children born into the same family, for instance, show vastly different outcomes — even identical twins. The huge discrepancies are born of free will. Thomas Edison observed, “Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.” Michelangelo is said to have remarked, “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem like genius at all.”

Williams is preoccupied with recurring police misconduct symbolized by George Floyd’s murder, Black Lives Matter and political maneuverings seeking redress. This preoccupation misses the elephant in the room: the disintegration or collapse of the Black family, the prime engine for inculcating behavioral norms indispensable to success. The alarming phenomenon was highlighted in the 1965 Moynihan Report, named after scholar and later senator from New York Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

The government does not create human capital. It is created in the home with mothers and fathers as role models. The government acts with ulterior motives that diverge from the interests of professed beneficiaries. Parents ordinarily act in the best interests of their children.

The author steers away from addressing self-help options for ameliorating the living conditions of Black Americans. The omission is odd because the political successes of the Black community, including twice-elected President Barack Obama and former vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, have not edged the nation closer to a post-racial society as conceived by the second Civil Rights Movement.

The Supreme Court did the country a favor in holding racial preferences in college or university admissions unconstitutional in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023). An even playing field, admittedly, will not yield perfect justice because we are not born into the same circumstances. But experience teaches that government-ordained quotas or recognition of group rights is a cure vastly worse than the disease.