Eligible And Qualified

All right.  So what do I tell 663,000 people in 2 years or 3 years when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding is not there anymore, guys?

I think people in the White House, the amateurs advising the President, are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise. ...

It is inescapable that this bill, in its current form, will betray the very promise that Donald J. Trump made in the Oval Office or in the Cabinet room when I was there with Finance, where he said: We can go after waste, fraud, and abuse on any programs. ...

I am telling the President that you have been misinformed.  Your supporting the Senate mark will hurt people who are eligible and qualified for Medicaid.

-- Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), speaking on the Senate floor during debate on the "Big Beautiful Bill", quoted from the Congressional Record, p. S3646 (28 June 2025)

What Everything Else Isn't

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste.  It's what everything else isn't.

-- Theodore Huebner Roethke (1908 - 1963), American poet, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954, Poetry and Craft (1965)

Narrow Escapes

It is happening here.  Democracy in America has been a series of narrow escapes.  We may be running out of luck, and no one is coming to save us.  For that, we have only ourselves.

-- Bill Moyers (5 June 1934 - 26 June 2025), American journalist and political commentator, We Hold This Truth to Be Self-Evident: It’s Happening Before Our Very Eyes (5 June 2020)

Air Quotes

We used to be called the world's greatest deliberative body.  I think we're still called it, but now I wonder if it's in air quotes.  We will survive as a democracy if we continue to respect the integrity of our institutions, and so that means respecting our own rules and how they operate.

-- Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) in an interview with the Washington Post (24 June 2025)

Rewarding Lawlessness

In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution.  In this case, the Government took the opposite approach.  It wrongfully deported one plaintiff to Guatemala, even though an Immigration Judge found he was likely to face torture there.  Then, in clear violation of a court order, it deported six more to South Sudan, a nation the State Department considers too unsafe for all but its most critical personnel.  An attentive District Court’s timely intervention only narrowly prevented a third set of unlawful removals to Libya.

Rather than allowing our lower court colleagues to manage this high-stakes litigation with the care and attention it plainly requires, this Court now intervenes to grant the Government emergency relief from an order it has repeatedly defied.  I cannot join so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion. ...

The Due Process Clause represents “the principle that ours is a government of laws, not of men, and that we submit ourselves to rulers only if under rules.”  By rewarding lawlessness, the Court once again undermines that foundational principle.  Apparently, the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in farflung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled.  That use of discretion is as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable. Respectfully, but regretfully, I dissent.

-- Justice Sotomayor, with whom Justice Kagan and Justice Jackson join, dissenting, in Department of Homeland Security, et al. v D.V.D., et al., on application for stay (23 June 2025)

Now More Than Ever

Who will stand up for our democracy?  This question, fraught in even the most peaceful times, has only grown more pressing as our country approaches its 250th anniversary.  Each passing day brings growing assaults on essential liberties like freedom of speech and due process.  Meanwhile, our delicately assembled legal system faces a constant barrage of threats.  Even as this issue reaches publication, the U.S. military has been deployed against peaceful protestors.  We teeter on the brink of collapse into an authoritarian state.  That is why, today, The Onion calls upon our lawmakers to sit back and do absolutely nothing.

Members of Congress -- now, more than ever, our nation desperately needs your cowardice.

Our republic is a birthright, an exceedingly rare treasure passed down from generation to generation of Americans.  It was gained through hard years of bloody resistance and can too easily be lost.  Our Founding Fathers, in their abundant wisdom, understood that all it would take was men and women of little courage sitting in the corridors of power and taking zero action as this precious inheritance was stripped away -- and that is where we have finally arrived. ...

But we have not descended entirely from a nation of fearful men, have we?  Let this be the moment to make amends for any missteps of American bravery and valor.  Congress, we are asking, nay, demanding: This coming Independence Day, don't wave the Stars and Stripes, that enduring symbol of liberty and rebellion.

Instead, wave the white flag of surrender.

Tu Stultus Es,
The Onion Editorial Board

-- Editorial from a hard copy edition of The Onion newspaper that was delivered to all members of Congress, along with a letter "Why I'm Sending Issues of 'The Onion' To Every Member Of Congress" (20 June 2025)

Our Willingness To Discipline

One of the widest gaps in human experience is the gap between what we say we want to be and our willingness to discipline ourselves to get there.

-- Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878 - 1969), American Baptist and Presbyterian minister, Living Under Tension : Sermons on Christianity Today (1941)