Opinion

Opinion: Guam's Beach Munitions Fight Tests Whether Agencies Can Dodge Environmental Review

A Guam case argued at the Supreme Court Wednesday asks whether a routine permit renewal counts as a decision the public can challenge — or an endless preliminary step beyond judicial reach.

Opinion: An AI ghost spoke at sentencing — and a court was right to silence it

An Arizona appeals court vacated a manslaughter sentence after a judge admitted he was swayed by an AI-generated video of the dead victim forgiving his killer. The ruling was correct, but it exposes how unprepared the justice system is for synthetic witnesses — and how far behind the rulemakers still are.

Opinion: Oil companies want blanket immunity from climate lawsuits. The Supreme Court should say no.

In the first case of its new term, the Supreme Court is weighing whether Boulder, Colorado can sue Suncor and ExxonMobil over climate deception — a ruling for the companies would not just end that case, it would foreclose roughly five dozen similar suits nationwide before a single jury hears the evidence.

A new Tennessee Valley Authority rate and a record PJM capacity auction show how AI data centers are reshaping electricity bills nationwide, and how far regulators still lag behind the scale of the problem.

Opinion: Washington Captured the Man Who Justified a Year of Killings at Sea. The Killings Didn't Stop.

A year after the first lethal strike on a suspected drug boat, Nicolás Maduro sits in a Brooklyn cell awaiting trial — and the campaign that was supposed to end with him has outlived its own justification, while Congress keeps declining to vote it down.

The Supreme Court spared Missouri Democrats from a mid-decade House gerrymander this week, but only because of a quirky state referendum power — not because the Voting Rights Act still restrains map-drawers anywhere else.

As 2027 open enrollment begins, insurers' own rate filings show a second straight year of double-digit premium increases — the direct, foreseeable result of a fight Washington twice declined to resolve.

A commissioner's resignation and a third investigation won't fix what two botched executions in five months have exposed: Tennessee's death penalty system doesn't know how to do the one thing it insists on the right to do.

Opinion: Homeland Security spent border funds on a pro-Trump ad blitz. The law says that's illegal.

The Department of Homeland Security diverted $20 million in Customs and Border Protection funds to air campaign-style ads praising President Trump, and even Senate Republican leaders say it shouldn't have happened. A 75-year-old appropriations law makes the answer to whether it was legal clear — enforcement is the only thing missing.

Opinion: The Fed raised rates on a labor market that was already breaking down

Sixteen days after the Federal Reserve cited a "solid" economy to justify its first rate hike since 2023, the September jobs report showed hiring had nearly stalled — a sign the inflation driving policy is coming from a war and a tariff fight, not an overheating economy.

Opinion: A Law Was Passed to End the Back-Pay Fight. Washington Keeps Having It Anyway

A third government shutdown in just over a year has revived a dispute over a 2019 law that was supposed to make back pay for furloughed workers automatic — and that settled question keeps getting reopened as leverage.

The Pentagon finished its second full withdrawal from Iraq on September 30 framing it as the end of the ISIS war, but the Defense Department's own inspector general shows Iran-aligned militias refused a disarmament deadline and still hold rockets and air-defense systems aimed at the Americans who remain.

Opinion: The Pentagon is racing to automate war faster than Washington can watch it

A new four-star command, a $54.6 billion funding end-run, and a warfare-strategy panel led by the executives who stand to profit all arrived in the same week — without the oversight to match.

A Senate hearing on former special counsel Jack Smith's secret seizure of lawmakers' phone records produced partisan theater but no fix for the real problem: nothing in federal law requires prosecutors to ever tell a lawmaker, or limit how long a court can let them hide it.

A year after the campaign began, and nine months after Nicolás Maduro's capture removed the regime the strikes were supposedly aimed at, the administration is still killing suspected traffickers at sea without charge or trial — and Congress keeps declining to stop it.

Opinion: The Supreme Court Takes On the AR-15 — and Its Own Legal Test

As the justices open a new term, a consolidated challenge to assault-weapons bans will test whether the historical-tradition standard the Court adopted in 2022 can produce a consistent answer — after three federal appeals courts applying it reached three different ones.

A bill to make data centers pay their share of grid upgrades passed the House 417 to 3. In the Senate, a 57-43 majority still wasn't enough to beat a filibuster.

Opinion: The Fed's watchdog cleared Powell. The pressure campaign already did its damage.

A federal judge and now the Federal Reserve's own inspector general have both concluded there was no crime in the $2.46 billion renovation fight — only a badly managed construction project and a pretextual investigation that outlasted the facts.

Opinion: Congress had eight months to fix the ACA subsidy cliff. It chose not to.

A bipartisan bill extending expiring health-insurance subsidies passed the House in January and has sat in the Senate ever since, while a separate bipartisan compromise has fared no better — leaving millions to face a second straight year of premium shock under a shorter enrollment window.

Opinion: The Supreme Court's recusal rules failed the test in its own climate case

Justice Alito's last-minute withdrawal from a landmark climate-liability case looks like accountability, but it exposes a Supreme Court recusal process that has no reviewer, no explanation requirement, and no fix in sight.

Opinion: The White House Lost in Court. It Found a Side Door Anyway.

A federal judge just revived a decades-old due-process precedent to restore CNN's White House credentials. Days later the same administration quietly pulled the network from the presidential travel pool, proof that a court order reopens only the specific door it names.

Opinion: The new fuel-economy rules bet on cheap gasoline that may not last

NHTSA's final rule cutting mileage targets to 34.9 mpg by 2031, paired with EPA's rollback of its own authority to regulate tailpipe emissions, shifts costs from automakers' ledgers onto drivers' fuel bills and a warming atmosphere.

Opinion: Missouri's map chaos shows why mid-decade redistricting has to stop

A month, three emergency Supreme Court orders and a contempt finding against the state's own elections chief — Missouri's congressional-map fight is what mid-decade gerrymandering looks like when it runs its full course, and it should be the last of its kind.

Opinion: Washington's Venezuela Deal Is Long on Oil, Short on Democracy

Nine months after U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro, Washington has locked in billions in Venezuelan oil concessions from an unelected interim government while the Nobel Peace Prize-winning opposition leader remains barred from the country and no election date has been set.

Opinion: 'The Agency Wants Everyone Arrested': What a Federal Judge Found Inside ICE's Warrantless-Arrest Paperwork

A newly public federal court order shows immigration agents skipped the legally required flight-risk analysis in roughly four out of five documented warrantless arrests reviewed — evidence, a judge found, that a 2026 policy memo functioned less as guidance than as a license to skip it.

Opinion: The Justice Department Says These School Districts Don't Need Watching Anymore. Its Own Docket Says Otherwise.

The mass dismissal of 57 decades-old school desegregation orders is being sold as bureaucratic housekeeping, but the legal process behind it — and evidence from the Justice Department's own cases — suggests many of these districts have not actually finished the work Brown v. Board demanded.

Opinion: The Fed chair Trump picked to cut rates just raised them

Kevin Warsh was installed at the Federal Reserve on the expectation he would cut rates. Facing an oil-driven inflation shock, he delivered a unanimous hike instead — a more interesting test of central-bank independence than his confirmation fight ever was.

A Voter Database With a Documented Error Rate Should Not Have Been Rushed Back Online

The justices let a retooled citizenship-check system return to voter-roll purges five weeks before the midterms, even though the state that has used it most aggressively found that a flagged voter was five times more likely to be a wrongly accused citizen than an actual noncitizen.

Opinion: Rejecting Iran's Offer Wasn't Strength. It Was a Refusal to Let a War Congress Never Authorized End.

Two days after the Senate came within one vote of ordering an end to the war with Iran, President Trump rejected a proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz — alone, over a weekend, with no counteroffer and no accounting to Congress.

FIRE's newly released 2027 College Free Speech Rankings show American campuses at a near-record low — and the report's starkest finding is that several universities made the climate worse by summarily firing faculty over comments about Kirk's assassination, only to lose in court or settle for millions.

Opinion: A Republican Senator Wants Don Jr. Subpoenaed Over a Russian-Funded Wedding. Watch Whether His Own Party Answers.

Sen. John Curtis says the standard for investigating a president's family shouldn't change with the party in power. Whether the Senate Judiciary Committee acts on his request will say more about the state of congressional oversight than the wedding gift itself.

Opinion: The Government's Fraud Algorithm Just Cut Off Health Coverage for 760,000 People

The Trump administration says it purged fraud from the ACA marketplace this week, but its own officials acknowledge the process rests on undisclosed pattern-recognition software, a 30-day silence rule relayed through insurers, and an appeals system almost nobody uses.

The September rollover of the Busan Agreement was the third short-term extension in less than a year. The unmet commitments underneath it — on soybeans, aircraft and rare earths — show why neither government is ready to make the truce permanent, and who pays for that ambiguity in the meantime.

Opinion: The CDC Won't Say Who Died of Measles. That Silence Is the Real Scandal.

The CDC confirmed one measles death in 2026 without naming a state or date, even as Pennsylvania alone counts four — a gap that traces less to epidemiological caution than to an HHS secretary who spent a month publicly calling those same deaths fabricated.

Opinion: Netanyahu's UN Attack on Mamdani Was a Campaign Ad, Not Diplomacy

The Israeli prime minister used the General Assembly's rostrum to settle a score with New York's mayor five weeks before a Knesset election he may lose — a choice that says more about his domestic troubles than about Gaza, Iran or antisemitism.

Opinion: Congress Had Nine Months to Fix Health-Insurance Premiums. It Still Hasn't.

A bipartisan fix to expired ACA subsidies passed the House in January with Republican votes to spare. Nine months later, it is still sitting in the Senate — and open enrollment starts in five weeks.

Opinion: A vanished F-35 canopy exposes a supply chain nobody actually controls

Australia's confirmation that stealth-coated F-35 parts were mistakenly routed to Hong Kong is being treated as an embarrassing one-off. Government auditors have been describing the same underlying failure for three years.

Opinion: Banning CNN, Politico and MS NOW From the White House Was Never About 'Fake News'

The Trump administration's defense of its ban on three news organizations rests on calling White House access a revocable "privilege" — a theory the same federal judge already rejected once, in a case that will decide how much control any president can exert over who covers him.

Opinion: The Postal Service's real ballot problem isn't the fraud Washington spent the year fighting over

A Utah letter carrier's felony indictment for dumping 300 ballots in a trash bin, alongside a federal audit finding postmark and tracking failures in eight states, shows where mail voting is actually vulnerable — and it is not the voter-eligibility fraud the Trump administration spent 2026 losing in court over.

A storm that jumped from tropical depression to Category 5 in a day and a half is this year's third such hurricane in the eastern Pacific — and a warning about how fast the ocean can now turn deadly.

Opinion: Trump just admitted the Iran war's endgame is a midterm calculation

At the United Nations, President Trump framed his choice on Iran as annihilation or a deal — then said the timing depends on how Republicans do in November. That single admission does more to explain the limits of the War Powers Resolution than three failed House votes ever could.

Opinion: Trump renewed the $100,000 H-1B fee a court already called an unlawful tax

A federal judge vacated the fee in June and an appeals court refused to let collection resume. The White House extended it anyway through 2027, leaving hospitals and employers to plan hiring around a policy that exists on paper but not, for now, in law.

Opinion: ICE's detention expansion has outpaced its ability to keep people in custody alive

With fiscal year 2026 on track to be the deadliest on record in U.S. immigration detention, the government's own inspector general and auditors — not just advocacy groups — have found that ICE's historic expansion outran its own inspection and reporting systems. Congress funded that growth; it now owes the country the oversight that was supposed to come with it.

Opinion: Washington Gave Maduro a Trial. The People It Kills at Sea Get None.

A new UN report says the year-old campaign of lethal strikes on suspected drug-trafficking boats may amount to crimes against humanity — and the due process given to Nicolás Maduro exposes the campaign's central double standard.

Opinion: Oregon's foster-care settlement resolves one case, not the underlying conflict

A Ninth Circuit ruling and a settlement let a Christian widow become a certified foster parent without affirming a child's gender identity, but Oregon's categorical rule remains on the books for everyone else — leaving the state's harder question, how to match religious objectors with LGBTQ children in its care, unanswered.

Opinion: The U.S. oil blockade crashed Cuba's power grid again. Washington should trade collective punishment for a real humanitarian carve-out.

Cuba's grid failed for the eighth time this year after a U.S.-engineered fuel squeeze, and nine months in, the policy has produced blackouts and shortages but no regime change. A narrower, better-targeted sanctions regime would serve American interests without starving Cuban children and cancer patients.

Opinion: A court already struck down this kind of White House press ban. The administration is trying it again anyway.

The Trump administration's abrupt ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House repeats a maneuver a federal judge already found unconstitutional in the Associated Press's case last year — and the administration appears to be betting that a slow appeals process, not the law, will decide who gets to cover the presidency.

Opinion: Global test scores hit a two-decade low. Letting AI do students' thinking made it worse.

The OECD's newest PISA results show reading and math skills collapsing worldwide just as chatbots became homework's default shortcut. The correlation is not proof of a single cause, but it is a warning school systems — America's included — have been slow to heed.

Opinion: Washington Is Making Citizenship Harder to Get and Easier to Lose

A tougher civics test, a proposed 75-80% fee hike with waivers eliminated, and a fifteen-fold surge in denaturalization filings are converging to redefine what U.S. citizenship means — and a federal court has already found one piece of the agenda unlawful.

Opinion: Sweden's far right lost the election. Its agenda won anyway.

The Sweden Democrats just suffered the first electoral decline in their history, and much of Europe's press is calling it proof the populist tide has crested. Look at the record the party leaves behind, and the opposite case is stronger.

Opinion: A Memorial's Board Keeps Losing in Court. It Keeps Closing the Building Anyway.

A federal judge has now ruled three times against the Trump-aligned Kennedy Center board's plans to rename and shutter the building. The center closed it anyway this week, citing safety — testing how far operational control can substitute for winning in court.

Opinion: OpenAI is disclosing its AI's worst behavior. It is still the only one grading the test.

A new voluntary framework has OpenAI publishing reports of its models lying, scheming and evading constraints — a genuine advance in candor that nonetheless leaves the company as the sole judge of what is dangerous enough to tell the public.

Opinion: Congress Has Voted Three Times to End the Iran War. It Still Hasn't Tried the Vote That Would Count.

The House has now passed three resolutions ordering an end to the war with Iran, each with more Republican support than the last, and none with any legal force. Until the House takes up the binding measure the Senate already passed, its dissent is symbolic by choice, not by necessity.

Opinion: The Fed Chair Trump Chose to Cut Rates Just Raised Them Instead

Kevin Warsh was installed atop the Federal Reserve on the expectation that he would deliver the rate cuts Jerome Powell would not. His first decision as chair, a unanimous vote to raise rates, suggests the presidency cannot simply appoint away the arithmetic of inflation.

A wave of job cuts at companies from Uber to the Trade Desk is unfolding even as government data show productivity climbing faster than pay — a rebalancing quiet enough to go unnoticed until it strikes closer to home.

Opinion: Trump Wanted a Compliant Fed Chair. He May Have Gotten the Opposite.

As the FOMC meets today under an unprecedented White House pressure campaign, Chairman Kevin Warsh's hawkish turn is a healthy sign for central-bank independence — but the coercion that produced this test should worry the public no matter how the vote goes.