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a judge's gaven on a wooden table
Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash
Judicial Independence Over Judicial Sycophancy
Jun 06, 2026
While the President of the United States has the power under Article II, section 2 of the United States Constitution to appoint justices of the Supreme Court and other federal judges, all of whom have lifetime tenure, the President must exercise this power with the “Advice and Consent” of the Senate. The Senate’s advice and consent cannot be meaningfully exercised without the chance to question judicial nominees. Thus, a key component of the Senate’s evaluative process is the confirmation hearings during which senators question the President’s nominees.
Many nominees are alert to efforts to discern their views on disputed legal issues and unsettled law and decline to answer such questions or answer them in a manner that avoids violating the prohibition against opining. Nominees of both parties who were appointed to the Supreme Court rightly refused to answer such questions.
One Republican nominee who scrupulously honored the prohibition against answering improper questions, even off the record, was Roger J. Miner, then a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. In 1987, Judge Miner was reputedly at the top of President Ronald Reagan’s list of possible replacements for Judge Robert H. Bork when opposition to his Supreme Court nomination became insurmountable. During the pendency of the Bork confirmation hearings, a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee telephoned Miner at his home and inquired into his views on the then hot-button issue of abortion. Miner’s wife overheard her husband reply that “he would decide each case on its merits.” Judge Miner later explained to his wife that his “reputation was too high a price to pay for a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States.”
During the recent Senate confirmation hearings, the nominees for various federal courts were asked, “Who won the 2020 election?” Some senators were taken aback when the nominees uniformly answered that President Biden “was certified as the winner of the 2020 election.” Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) observed that the nominees were unwilling to say that Biden had won the election. The nominees did not try to disabuse the senator of his observation, and when the senator again confronted one of them with their unwillingness to say whether or not Biden had won the election, the nominee asserted that it had become “a matter of political concern,” to which Blumenthal retorted that it was also “an issue of fact.” The nominee then avoided a direct answer by using the word “fact” when stating that Biden was “in fact certified the winner of the 2020 election.” As all the nominees similarly skirted a direct answer, Blumenthal concluded that they feared offending the President.
In its November 2025 report, the organization Demand Justice earlier had noted that all 44 recent federal judicial nominees provided the same answer to the Biden question “using key words and evasive language,” to avoid answering “basic questions of documented, established, and historical fact,” namely that Biden won the popular vote. Other nominees were not even willing to state that Biden was certified the winner, instead asserting only that he “served” as President.
Notably, and in contrast to the question posed to Judge Miner, these nominees were not asked about an unsettled or disputed legal issue, as it is more than six years since the 2020 election, and it had already been fully litigated. “Given the sheer number of election-related cases that lacked merit, federal judges in states like Colorado, Michigan, and Wisconsin have begun moving to consider and, in at least one instance thus far, implement sanctions against the lawyers that submitted them.” That the Department of Justice has commenced investigations into the election procedures of certain states does not alter those facts.
As judicial independence complements, if not ensures, a judge’s neutrality, the uniformly evasive answers of the nominees reflect obeisance to the President, rather than compliance with the prohibition of “allow[ing] family, social, political, or other relationships to influence judicial conduct or judgment.” At any other time in American history, such obeisance would be disqualifying. Why refuse to acknowledge the popular vote? What harm is there other than offending the President?
While we are free to express or not express ourselves when we see fit, nominees to the federal judiciary must candidly and honestly answer proper questions posed by senators of both parties. The nominees’ responses at the recent confirmation hearings reflect a lack of candor at best and, at worst, immoderate obeisance to the President. Such sycophancy in a judge does not pass the smell test; this retired judge smells a rat.
Justice Barbara Jaffe, retired from the Supreme Court of the State of New York, is a volunteer of Lawyers Defending American Democracy (LDAD).
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Statue Of Liberty
Photo by Brandon Mowinkel on Unsplash
Letter to America From the First-Generation of Breaking a Cycle
Jun 06, 2026
As part of a collaboration between The Fulcrum's NextGen initiative and Made By Us, The Fulcrum is publishing Letters to America, a series created through the Youth250 project that invites Gen Z to reflect on the nation’s past, present, and future as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary.
America is built on values. Its first official texts announce the importance of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those three things might have slightly different meanings to individual people. But our understanding of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness isn’t so different that we miss the larger picture.
Most of us can agree what these three things aren’t: selling American lives for oil, allowing government officials to invade private spaces to selectively enforce immigration rules, or forcing women to have risky C-sections.
My parents are immigrants, and came to the U.S. as adults. They made the choice, willingly and joyfully, to pledge allegiance to this country. Nowhere is perfect, but my parents were happy that here, they had free access for their daughters to decent schools, economic opportunities, and free speech. My sisters and I were all born in the same hospital and raised in the same small city, and all we know is America. It is our country: my sister works for the government, my dad served his community in healthcare for over thirty years, and I am studying to become a lawyer. Any talk of going “home” goes nowhere, because this is our home. Immigrants are the backbone of this country, and they make America special.
But some of our policies and actions, right now, make it easy to forget the bold, unified, and free vision that compelled the original Americans to accept the Constitution and its promises.
For America’s 250th birthday, I picture a recommitment to what the founders sought in the revolution and wrote in our founding texts, even when they couldn’t always live up to it. No kings; dignity and respect for individuals; economic flourishing for all, not just aristocrats.
I spend a lot of my time telling my friends and family that two things can be simultaneously true: that life and this country are much better than they were 100 years ago, and that we could still be doing much better. People are physically healthier, live longer, live in less pain, have more free time, and have more rights than before. At the same time, America is the richest country in the world, and its people, my friends and family, often feel left behind. It’s sometimes hard to feel lucky when government officials intimidate, tear gas, assault, or even kill people for doing the first thing this country promised them: the right to free speech and assembly.
No one believes in the American dream like the people who chose to be here, and the young people like me who want to see this country flourish into my old age feel the stakes in trying to keep this country great and make it better. I don’t want to repeat the generational pattern: my grandparents fled Palestine, and my parents fled Kuwait. I want my daughter to grow up in a free country that fully embodies its promises, to give her the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I choose this country, and I hope that together, we all choose it too.
Sara Abdulla, 29, Chicago, IL
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An Ecuadorian soldier stands in front of Basilica del Voto Nacional.
Credit: Sophia Lumsdaine
Cocaine and Corruption: As U.S. Military Operations Continue, Ecuadorians Say Drug Crime Needs Holistic Response
Jun 06, 2026
In November, Ecuadorians voted against allowing U.S. military bases in their country. Just over three months later, U.S. armed forces launched operations there, collaborating with the Ecuadorian military in a campaign designed to crack down on narcotics transit and associated crime within the country.
The joint effort has included regional curfews, arrests of gang members, and targeted bombing. It has also been criticized as military overreach, with a group of U.S. lawmakers backed by human rights groups raising concerns over the conduct of the U.S. military in Ecuador during the last several months. The U.S. military presence is also controversial for Ecuadorians, said Ernesto Anzieta, the Metropolitan Director for Citizen Security in Quito.
“The problem is that you are putting [the] military in contact with populations which in some cases are innocent people, in other cases are people that are non-combatants… but are related to criminal gangs, and in other cases they are enemies,” he said in an interview.
Ecuador is not a major producer of cocaine, but 70% of the world’s supply is smuggled through the country and exported to Europe and North America from its coast. Formerly one of Latin America’s most peaceful countries, narcotics and associated gang activity have made Ecuador one of its most violent.
“Ecuador for a long time was an island of peace,” said Anzieta. The country, he said, is not institutionally prepared for what is going on.
Organized crime is multifaceted, encompassing a broad network of corruption in the justice system and the incarceration system, with gangs adapting to traffic whatever goods are most profitable. Right now, narcotics gangs are also involved in Ecuador’s illegal gold mining industry. Cartel violence must be viewed as the systemic issue it is, Anzieta said.
Eddie Contreras, who served as a member of the Ecuadorian military for more than 25 years, supports the U.S. joint military operation. At the same time, he said, corruption must also be addressed within the incarceration system, the justice system, the political structure, and the military itself.
Military operations are sending gang members to prisons, Contreras said, but violence levels remain high, and criminals still operate and recruit from the jails. “The prisons are universities of perfection for crime,” he said in Spanish.
Lorena Villavicencio, a security and defense specialist who worked in Ecuador’s National Assembly and the Ministry of National Defense, proposed bolstering protection and compensation for prison workers, conducting a serious investigation into criminal connections in the transportation and private security sectors, and addressing the lack of social services in poor communities.
Drug trafficking gangs have developed territorial control largely in western provinces, which often withstands strong-arm military operations, according to Villavicencio. “When we have these big operations, it helps, but after a couple of weeks or months, statistics show that we get back to the same levels of violence.”
In some cases, after the military operation is finished, she said, gangs will move back into the area and question local people about what they told the military. Gangs function through extortion and threats, and military pressure can exacerbate this.
Gangs also control territory in large part because of the services they provide to their population. In the city of Duran, for instance, “you have these criminal groups who are basically in charge of providing the water… for the population,” said Villavicencio. “If you have a part of society who doesn’t have the state to provide basic needs … electricity, education, health…the organized crime will use that.”
The German social development organizations Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung have been doing good work in Ecuador, Villavicencio said, also pointing to the initiatives of the European Union in collaborations such as “El PAcCTO” and campaigns to raise awareness about child and teenage gang recruitment. These social development programs must be part of efforts to combat organized crime in the country, she believes.
During his presidency, Donald Trump has prioritized exerting influence in the Western Hemisphere, bombing more than 59 boats the U.S. says were carrying narcotics in the Caribbean and Pacific. The U.S. also captured Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and imposed extensive sanctions on Cuba, while President Trump has founded the Shield of the Americas, a coalition of some Latin American countries whose objectives include stopping “criminal and narco-terrorist gangs and cartels” throughout the Americas.
An American military presence in Ecuador may be helpful in the short term, but in the long term, Ecuador will need to ensure its own efficacy as a state, said Villavicencio. “[I]f the state [is] not able to manage their own challenges… if you don’t have strong institutions internally… any type of … cooperation would not be effective enough to be sustainable in the long run.”
Cocaine and Corruption: As U.S. Military Operations Continue, Ecuadorians Say Drug Crime Needs Holistic Response was first published on the Latino News Network and was republished with permission.
Sophia Lumsdaine is a student of history, political science, journalism, and Spanish at George Fox University. She recently spent four months abroad in Quito, Ecuador.
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image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.