How will America’s distinctive body of defamation law shape what we hear about the forthcoming election? Will we all be subjected to another firehose of stolen-election lies because the New York Times v. Sullivan doctrine, as one Supreme Court Justice has claimed, generates “an ironclad subsidy for the publication of falsehoods by means and on a scale previously unimaginable”? (I try to straighten out some election untruths in a new Cato podcast.) Or, conversely, does Sullivan leave even big media organizations so legally exposed that even flimsy lawsuits and threats can inhibit their investigations and reporting? (Plenty of dubious suits keep getting filed.)

Or maybe both? One of the paradoxes of US defamation law—which combines Sullivan’s relatively press-friendly “actual malice” standard with a lack of the loser-pays principle found in many other countries—is that it simultaneously puts coercive leverage in the hands of those who want to bully writers and speakers even as it leaves many defamed parties with no practical legal recourse. 

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Obamacare’s history is one of policymakers disregarding the law to achieve greater control over their fellow citizens. So the Trump administration’s recent announcement that it will stop issuing unlawful and often fraudulent Obamacare subsidies is a welcome departure from that history. The administration has also taken worthwhile steps to curb Medicaid fraud. 

The administration should go further, and not just in Obamacare. Fraud occurs at intolerable levels throughout government health programs. The New York Times cites a Congressional Budget Office estimate that there are perhaps 2.3 million cases of the federal government issuing improper Obamacare premium subsidies, but the administration is canceling just 750,000. Likewise, every year since 1990, the Government Accountability Office has warned Congress that Medicare poses a high risk of “waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement.” 

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Diesel fuel exports from the Middle East have been cut in half this year in some of the ever-spreading economic fallout from the wars in Iran and Ukraine. In the United States, the price of diesel at the pump has soared above $6.50 for the first time. A year ago, the price was $3.70. US diesel inventories have plummeted since the start of the Iran war on February 28, and some diesel consumers are pulling up to the pump only to find it empty. Some retailers have simply run out of supply. 

Most American passenger cars still run on gasoline. So, most voter angst is directed at rising gasoline prices. But trucks, tractors, trains, ships, and much more run on diesel, which is the lifeblood fuel of much of the American industrial and agricultural economy. With six weeks remaining until the upcoming mid-term elections, the price of fuel, including diesel, has moved to the top of voter concerns. A growing number of Members of Congress, led by senior Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, have been urging President Donald Trump to ban the export of diesel fuel. 

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President Trump’s White House has repeatedly attempted to deny journalists access to presidential press conferences. This time, the White House has excluded several journalists because their coverage was allegedly “one-sided” and “negative.” Such efforts by the White House are illegal; they have failed in the past, and they will fail in the future.

The reasons the Trump White House has given in the past for its attempts to pick and choose which journalists are allowed to cover it have varied, but all of them have one thing in common: they cannot be reconciled with the law. Jim Acosta’s press pass was revoked because he continued to ask questions and refused to yield his microphone to another journalist. Brian Karem’s press pass was revoked essentially because he made remarks that were understood as rude and confrontational. The Associated Press was excluded because it used the label “Gulf of Mexico,” rather than “Gulf of America.” 

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The Muslim Community Center (MCC) of Silver Spring, Maryland, founded in the early 1980s, is not just a place of worship but also a cultural space where, as they describe it, “faith meets community, service, and understanding.” On Saturday, September 19, I had the chance to visit the center for a talk on my recently edited Cato book, No Compulsion in Religion—No Exceptions: Islamic Arguments for Religious Freedom. 

The event was made possible thanks to a member of the community, Dr. Ashraf Sufi, who had read the book — along with some of my earlier work — and invited me to speak on the foundations of religious freedom in Islam. I found a warm, welcoming, and curious audience, with whom I shared some key arguments for establishing “no compulsion in religion” in the Islamic world. 

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Many in the K‑12 education world are anxiously awaiting the proposed regulations on the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit (FSTC). The program, enacted in the 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill,” provides a dollar-for-dollar federal income tax credit, up to $1,700, for donations to approved scholarship-granting organizations. 

The law requires the Secretary of the Treasury to issue “such regulations or other guidance” deemed necessary for the program. In June, the Treasury Department said the regulations would be issued “this coming back-to-school season—no later than the end of September.” 

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On September 14, DC District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg ruled on the Cato Institute’s long-running Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the FBI—a case seeking the Bureau’s records about Cato itself. The opinion is mixed, though the court ruled against the Bureau on several points.

Boasberg rejected as “flimsy” the FBI’s claims that revealing the location of the Los Angeles Field Office’s Counterterrorism Division that investigated Cato (revealed in January 2025 in documents at issue in the lawsuit) would assist others in circumventing the law. 

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