Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Republican Liberty

Republican Liberty

SHE’D HAVE BEEN A CONSERVATIVE ON THE WARREN/BURGER COURT:

Kagan Says Supreme Court Has Stood Up to Trump in Key Cases (Abbie VanSickle, July 23, 2026, NY Times)

“I think that is a bad rap,” Justice Elena Kagan said during an appearance in Washington State, at an annual gathering of judges and lawyers who work in the judiciary’s Ninth Circuit.

“Is this court very conservative?” she continued. “Does it do a bunch of things that are out of the playbook of the conservative legal movement that I think are deeply wrong? Yes.”

“But,” she added, “is this court kind of a puppet for the current administration? I think definitely not.”

Founding Republican Liberty

THE REPUBLICAN “WE”:

The Language of Unity: Glenn Loury on Gouverneur Morris: His “We the People” expresses the work of fulfilling the American Idea. (Glenn Loury, Thursday, July 9, 2026, Freedom Frequency)

Of all the figures gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, few would have seemed less likely to speak for “the American people” than Gouverneur Morris. Wealthy, cosmopolitan, and aristocratic in bearing, he was impatient with cant and openly skeptical of democratic enthusiasms. A striking figure who moved through the world on a wooden leg—the result of a gruesome carriage accident years earlier—he retained a caustic wit and an abundance of self-regard. Morris was no plaster saint for schoolbooks. He was vain, rakish, and at times contemptuous of the masses. Yet the delegates entrusted him with the final drafting of the Constitution. Much of its language bears his mark. The most enduring words in the Preamble are unmistakably his: “We the People of the United States . . . ”

Those are radical words, though their familiarity has blunted their radicalism. The Constitution might easily have opened as a compact among sovereign states—Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts—each jealous of its prerogatives. That phrasing would have ratified the dominant political reality of the day: most Americans at that time thought of themselves first as citizens of their states. Morris made a different choice. His preamble was not mere literary polish. It gave expression to a political idea that was still struggling to become a reality: that Americans were one people.

The ambition embodied in those words was extraordinary then and remains so today. America was never a tribe bound by blood, ancestry, or ancient custom. It gathered people of disparate regions, denominations, interests, and origins.

Republican Liberty

CREATED:

Who Is God in the Declaration?: He’s far more than the Supreme Secular Rationalist. (Matthew Spalding, April 27, 2026, Modern Age)

God appears several times in the Declaration. Indeed, the first character introduced in the Declaration’s narrative, before “the present King of Great Britain,” is God. We noted earlier that God exercises legislative power (the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God), executive power (as Creator and divine Providence), and judicial power (Supreme Judge of the world) without being a tyrant. All that is true and makes an important point about the danger of unified power in human hands. But this is a view that considers God in primarily human, political terms.

A more sublime view becomes clear when we consider the appearances of God as they develop throughout the whole document. God first appears by virtue of man’s unaided reason—a traditional understanding of the Laws of Nature—in the form of the general revelation of the natural order. This is the God who makes laws for all things, including men and all peoples. Then God appears as the Creator, not just of nature in general but of man in particular. This is the God whose work “we hold” to be self-evident, and who endows man with certain unalienable rights. God then appears as the Supreme Judge of the world, specifically the judge of man—the only rational being on earth. This God is all-knowing and sees the deepest intentions of each person. And God appears finally as divine Providence. This God doesn’t merely create the world and then leave it alone but continues to intervene in the affairs of men and sometimes changes the course of human events.

And notice the parallel: how the human actors become more personal and particular (moving from “one people,” to a corporate “we” who holds truths, to the specific “Representatives of the united States of America,” to the particular “we” who are the signers) at the same time that the references to the deity become more personal and intimate. The theological references move from a general, distant, and unknown God to the creator and endower of man as a species, to a personal God who knows the lives and innermost thoughts of each man, to the benevolent God who intervenes to protect those who rely on divine providence.

Republican Liberty

AUTHORITY DEPENDS ON LIBERTY:

How Britain drove America to independence (Jack Blackburn, July 01 2026, Times uk)

Parliament repealed the Stamp Act and the story might have ended there, but the British government now had a point to prove. It passed the Declaratory Act, which made clear that parliament had the same authority in America as it did in Britain. As far as they were concerned, the principle of parliamentary authority was the cornerstone of the British constitution and needed defending. Meanwhile, revenue still needed to be drummed up. It was not long before these twin objectives reopened the wounds in the Anglo-American relationship.

Our rights as Englishmen required participatory governance and equal treatment under law.

End of History Founding Republican Liberty

FROM EVERY MOUNTAINSIDE:

The Revolution Continues: The American Revolution is still going on—not because we ourselves are wise and good but because it embodies an idea that reaches everybody and will never lose its force. (Bruce Catton, June 1976, American Heritage)


The bell is old and it is badly cracked and it has not been rung for years, nor will it ever be rung again. But although it is quite useless from a practical standpoint, it is perhaps the most prized possession we have. It carries words about proclaiming liberty to all the people, and when it spoke it set off long echoes that have never stopped reverberating. The Liberty Bell announced that the American people were in fact making a revolution and not just demonstrating for a redress of grievances, and few announcements in the history of the human race have been more momentous.

Anglospherics Founding Republican Liberty

NO CREATOR, NO REPUBLIC:

Are These Truths Really Self-Evident? A Q&A with Rémi Brague (Nathaniel Peters and Rémi Brague, 6/25/26, Public Discourse)

Rémi Brague: Declaring these principles as if they were self-evident truths required some nerve. They were not so for the ancient world; on the contrary. As for human equality, for instance, we read In Homer’s Odyssey that when a man is enslaved, he loses the half part of his wits. The Founding Fathers, who were steeped in the classics, knew that full well. Consequently, they had to ground the principles on an idea they borrowed from the Bible: the will of a benevolent Creator God.

Books Film/TV Republican Liberty

TEAM MENSCH:

Camus and Columbo? The Unlikely Link Between European Existentialism and American Detective TV Series: The television series Columbo and Camus’ novel ‘A Happy Death’ were directly inspired by Dostoevsky’s classic novel of existential guilt, ‘Crime and Punishment.’ (Simon Lea, 6/25/26, The Collector)

The detective in Crime & Punishment is Porfiry Petrovich, the head of the Investigation Department. Just like Lieutenant Columbo, Petrovich never bullies, harasses, or even outright accuses his suspect. Rather, the psychologically astute detective seeks to confuse, provoke, and trap Raskolnikov into confessing. In addition, in Levison and Link’s television series, Colombo also refrains from showing animosity towards the men he knows to be murderers. Often, Colombo sets clever traps designed to force the murderer’s hand and draw out a confession. In Dostoevsky’s novel, Petrovich does so too. […]

Raskolnikov and Patrice both see their society’s laws and moral restrictions as obstructions to be overcome by superior people. For them, people are ultimately free to do what is best for them and have a responsibility to take control of their own lives. Both characters consider themselves to be stifled by a lack of funds and take it upon themselves to acquire what they need without concern for other people’s rules. The murderers in Columbo all think the same way.

End of History Founding Religion Republican Liberty

NO CREATION, NO UNIVERSALISM:

Reading the Declaration of Independence as Holy Text: How the American creed emerged—and evolved—over 250 years (Kathryn Lofton, 6/08/26, Yale Review)

To achieve independence in 1776, the founders needed people besides themselves to believe in it and practice it. The message of their Philadelphia story could have been many things. Social coherence is something religion provides, often through repeating a story and asserting its moral. Creed is the word scholars use for those incantatory phrases that convey and perform adherence. all Men aRe cReated equal is a creed, in gOd we tRust another. libeRty is a third. Saying a creed publicizes commitment, claims distinction, and tests orthodoxy. A person can have a creed they describe as personal, but a creed is ultimately corporate, something other people can hear and repeat back: “Me too.”

Conservative Thought Law/Crime Republican Liberty

MITCH AND THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY PICKED CONSERVATIVES, NOT TRUMPISTS:

The Hard Right Hates Neil Gorsuch: How the freakout over Gorsuch’s comments reveals a deeper rift between constitutionalists and nativists. (Daniel Ruggles, May 18, 2026, The Bulwark)

During a media blitz this month to promote his new children’s book, Heroes of 1776: The Story of the Declaration of Independence, Gorsuch repeated the same message over and over: The United States is a “creedal” nation—that is, a nation unified by common belief in rights, liberties, and democratic institutions. Yes, he explained, we are a people with a singular “heritage,” but it’s one of ideals, not ethnicity. Being an American requires not lineage, but belief.

It was a gentle rebuke of nationalism—and it drove the hard right nuts.

Americans largely agree with Gorsuch that, when it comes to citizenship, belief in American ideas trumps genealogy. In an earlier dispensation, his comments would have been taken as an innocuous, even saccharine, idealism about the nation’s founding and self-rule—totally typical for a conservative jurist.

But we are not in that earlier dispensation. Gorsuch’s repeated references to “creed” exposed a stark divide between far-right ideologues (with their nativist America First agenda) and the conservative originalist old guard. For decades, the right has campaigned to fill courtrooms with self-professing originalists. Now, that old guard—personified by Gorsuch, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and Chief Justice John Roberts—is something of a wild card on the Supreme Court. And it’s causing tension, especially as the court gets ready to rule on birthright citizenship.

Republican Liberty

…DEEP BREATHS:

At Harvard Talk, Retired Supreme Court Justice Breyer Defends Shadow Docket (Lydialyle Gibson, Harvard Magazine)

“Every court has what you’re saying is a shadow docket, which we call an emergency docket,” he said, explaining that throughout most of the Supreme Court’s history the docket had been used primarily to issue stays of execution in death penalty cases. “Or sometimes,” he added, there would be a “very important case about an election or an election rule, and we might issue the stay.”

Tracing the increasing use of the shadow docket in part to the rash of legal challenges that sprang up in the wake of vaccine mandates and other restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, Breyer—who now serves as Byrne professor of administrative law at Harvard Law School and as a visiting judge for the First Circuit Court of Appeals—rejected the notion that “there’s some kind of plot involved within the Court to get this or that decided.”

Instead, he argued, the nature of cases reaching the court on an emergency basis has changed: rather than death penalty and election matters, many cases more often involve constitutional disputes about “the nature of the constitutional relationship” between Congress and the president and the separation of powers.”

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