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Why free speech rights got left out of the Constitution – and added in later via the First Amendment

Supporters of free speech gather in September 2025 to protest the suspension of 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!', across the street from the theater where the show is produced in Hollywood.

Why free speech rights got left out of the Constitution – and added in later via the First Amendment

Bipartisan agreement is rare in these politically polarized days.

But that’s just what happened in response to ABC’s suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” The suspension followed the Federal Communications Commission chairman’s threat to punish the network for Kimmel’s comments about Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer.

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Pam Bondi Made a Mockery of Congressional Oversight
President Donald Trump holds a press conference with Attorney ...

Pam Bondi Made a Mockery of Congressional Oversight

Checks and balances can only work if government officials are willing to use their authority to check abuses of power by others. Without that, our Constitution is an empty promise.

And without the will to stand up to such abuses, freedom and democracy also become empty promises. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51, the Constitution was designed to ensure that “the interior structure of the government as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places.”

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Hostages Freed, Questions Remain: Trump’s Role and the Cost of Binary Politics

U.S. President Donald Trump, September 18, 2025.

(Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

Hostages Freed, Questions Remain: Trump’s Role and the Cost of Binary Politics

In February of this year, Kristina Becvar and I published a column in The Fulcrum reaffirming our mission amid a barrage of executive orders from the Trump Administration. We sought to clarify our role—not as partisan commentators, but as stewards of fact-based reporting and healthy self-governance.

We wrote then:

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From Nixon to Trump: How Scandals Reshape Power, Not Justice

Richard Nixon circa 1983.

(Photo by Images Press/IMAGES/Getty Images)

From Nixon to Trump: How Scandals Reshape Power, Not Justice

The American political system flatters itself with tales of enduring resilience. We are told that each scandal is a crucible, a test from which the republic emerges tougher, wiser, and better fortified. The institutions bend, the story goes, but they do not break. The narrative is comforting because it suggests that corruption is always self-limiting, that crisis is always purgative, that turmoil survived is justice fortified.

But the record tells another story. Scandal after scandal has not made American democracy sturdier. It has hollowed it out, teaching the powerful not restraint, but ever-shrewder ways to transgress.

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