Yuval Levin

Obamacare was a bad law that advanced bad policy and fit very poorly with the structure of our constitutional system. But a recent Department of Justice brief in a federal district-court case repeats and reinforces the very worst of the counter-constitutional cynicism that characterized the Obama administration’s approach.

We Americans have a habit of putting fundamental social and political questions out of our minds by turning them into technical legal questions. This tendency is one of the forces at work in the increasingly dramatic showdown between the Department of Justice and the President.

The Trump administration’s newly proposed rule to make it harder to use federal Title X dollars to promote and provide abortion is a modest but significant and important step.

More than any book published so far in this century, Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West deserves to be called a conservative classic.

Across society, people with roles to play inside institutions instead see those institutions as platforms for them to perform on, and the performance they offer up is generally a morality play about their own marginalization. As a result, too often no one claims ownership of the institutions of our society, and so no one accepts responsibility for them.

A decentralizing and deregulatory approach to health policy offers a substantively and politically attractive path for Republicans. But whether it turns out to be more attractive than falling back into the role of pure critics of Democratic health reforms remains to be seen.

A new Congressional Budget Office report nicely summarizes what should be obvious to all: the Republican Congress and president do not seem to care about deficits or debt, and are not only failing to take steps to address the government’s poor fiscal situation but are taking steps likely to worsen it some.

A White House dealing with an intense crisis needs to rely on established patterns of mutual trust and respect and familiar procedures for handling and channeling information, putting options before the president, and keeping things calm and organized. More than a year in, President Trump’s White House lacks almost all of that.

To note the deep dysfunction of the Trump administration is to insist that we should be careful not to get used to the unacceptable, and that some problems run much deeper than policy.

Journalism faces a crisis of public confidence, a crisis of integrity and trust. While complaints about the media naturally fall into the grooves of popular rejection of elite authority, they often have at least as much to do with skepticism about the integrity of the mainstream media as with its power.

A bipartisan agreement setting two-year caps on spending would strangle any real Republican agenda going forward.

The inability to worry properly without panicking makes it much harder for our politics to take the future seriously, to consider tradeoffs, and to see the case for less-than-radical policy action.