In the first part of their analysis on the potential for deploying the military during elections, Natalie Orpett, Molly Roberts, and Loren Voss unpacked the key statutes preventing such deployment, from the Civil War era through Reconstruction to modern limitations. They explained that the history is less a straight line than a fight: Congress moved to keep troops out of polling places as early as 1865, only to expand the military’s election role during Reconstruction, before reasserting and tightening the restrictions that remain on the books today—restrictions that go beyond the standard limitations on domestic deployments.
In the second part of their analysis, Orpett, Roberts, and Voss considered alternative interpretations of these statutes and the Constitution that claim the president is not barred from deploying the military during elections under certain circumstances. They mounted a detailed historical rebuttal of the Justice Department’s 1968 reading of the Insurrection Act’s interaction with election protection statutes, but acknowledged that constitutional theories like the “protective power” are murkier and remain untested in court. Either way, they warned that the legal ambiguity could enable a determined executive to deploy the military during elections before the courts could catch up.
On Lawfare Daily, Benjamin Wittes talked with Orpett, Voss, and Roberts about the limits the Constitution and statutes put on the use of military in U.S. elections—as well as the arguments an eager executive might make to skirt those restrictions. They discussed how legislators have long believed voting deserves special protection from military involvement and why, ahead of the 2026 midterms, that isn’t as reassuring as it might sound.
Michael Feinberg and Julia Curlee traced the current politicization at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) back through the office’s larger history. They explained that ODNI’s vague authorities, created in 2004 to coordinate a fractured post-9/11 intelligence community, were historically constrained by political norms to remain largely administrative. Feinberg and Curlee argued that those same authorities now give former DNI Tulsi Gabbard and acting DNI Bill Pulte the tools to manipulate intelligence and potentially interfere with elections.
On Lawfare Daily, Orpett talked with Feinberg and Curlee about ODNI, which was created to oversee the intelligence community but remains mysterious to the general public. They discussed what ODNI does, why it exists at all, and how recent developments are undermining its mission.
Eric Columbus unpacked why Todd Blanche is likely to continue serving as acting attorney general despite not being confirmed to do so by Congress. Columbus analyzed how the Attorney General Succession Act’s provision for the deputy attorney general to “exercise all the duties of that office” in case of a vacancy has been interpreted by courts to override the Federal Vacancies Reform Act and the Constitution’s Appointments Clause, allowing Blanche to serve indefinitely in an acting capacity.
On Lawfare Daily, Wittes sat down with Columbus, Kate Klonick, Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court’s rulings in the birthright citizenship case and Slaughter, indictments over purported vandalism at the Reflecting Pool, former CIA Director John Brennan’s civil suit against the Department of Justice, geofencing warrants, and more.
On this week’s Lawfare Live: The Trials of the Trump Administration, Wittes sat down with Anna Bower, Roberts, Columbus, and Parloff to discuss the Justice Department settling a second suit with Michael Flynn, developments in the E. Jean Carroll litigation, the D.C. Circuit denying a stay pending appeal of the order to take Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center, and more.
Nick Bednar and Todd Phillips highlighted how the sweeping removal powers affirmed for the president in the Supreme Court’s decision in Slaughter may be in tension with the Take Care Clause of the Constitution. They noted that some removals could leave multimember commissions below the threshold their statutes require for actions, such as with the recent firings at the Election Assistance Commission. In such cases, Bednar and Phillips argued that the commissions would be unable to execute their statutory obligations, thereby making the removals unconstitutional.
James Goodwin and Arvind Salem argued that the Department of Defense’s designation of Anthropic’s top artificial intelligence (AI) models as a “supply chain risk”—barring Pentagon contractors from working with the company—reveals an even bigger issue than the immediate legal dispute: how dependent the government, and much of the private sector, has become on just a few AI companies. That dependence, Goodwin and Salem contended, further removes decision-making power from civil servants accountable to the public.
Charlie Bullock argued that the Great American AI Act (GAAIA), a bipartisan discussion draft crafted by Reps. Obernolte and Trahan, offers the best federal frontier AI safety framework proposed to date—but its limited whistleblower protections and sweeping state law preemptions mean it does more harm than good in its current form.
On Lawfare Daily, Tyler McBrien sat down with Carissa Véliz to discuss her new book, “Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI.” They considered the history of prediction, why a healthy democracy—and a life well lived—requires uncertainty, Véliz’s belief that “artificial intelligence is the new Oracle of Delphi and tech executives the new prophets,” and more.
In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren discussed the implications of the Supreme Court’s decision in Slaughter for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702, the increasing offensive cyber capabilities of Canada’s signals intelligence agency, and more.
On Scaling Laws, Adi Tantravahi joined Kevin Frazier to talk about how AI can help cut through the administrative red tape that underlies and, in many ways, undermines the modern healthcare system. They unpacked the economics of healthcare billing, the growth of administrative overhead, and how AI systems might reshape the financial infrastructure of hospitals.
Cory Simpson examined Microsoft’s ambiguous threats of legal action against the researcher Nightmare Eclipse, who identified unpatched vulnerabilities in Windows systems. Simpson argued the episode exposes an industry-wide problem in coordinated vulnerability disclosure: eroding trust and communication between companies and the researchers who help keep their products safe.
Also on Scaling Laws, Kal Clark joined Frazier to explain how AI is already reducing diagnostic errors in radiology. They talked about how Clark’s company’s AI system functions as a second-look safety layer, the scale of diagnostic error in modern healthcare, the institutional barriers that have prevented systematic second reviews, privacy concerns around patient data, and more.
In last week’s Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Uren discussed Anthropic’s allegation that Alibaba conducted a major distillation attack that used Anthropic’s Claude to train its own AI model, reports that last year’s hack of Jaguar Land Rover was conducted by Russia, the restoration of Anthropic’s Fable model, and more.
Also on Scaling Laws, Andy Masley joined Frazier and Alan Rozenshtein to unpack the increasingly contentious issues related to data centers. They talked about Masley’s efforts to challenge what he sees as misleading claims about data center water use, land use, electricity rates, and local community impacts.
Pablo Chavez considered concerns raised by European allies about reliance on U.S. technologies, specifically that the U.S. could cut off access or collect European users’ data. Washington, Chavez argued, should take action to protect European users that private companies or Europe cannot by implementing statutory constraints on the U.S. government’s own ability to interfere with U.S. companies’ services abroad.
On Lawfare Daily, Scott R. Anderson sat down with reporter Joshua Keating to discuss his new series on how AI is impacting the use and development of nuclear weapons. Together, they explored what AI may mean for nuclear command, nuclear arms development, the global nonproliferation regime, and more.
Mattie C. Webb placed the Trump administration’s exceptional-refugee-status policy for Afrikaners into the historical context of apartheid-era solidarity networks. She suggested that President Trump’s support of the “white genocide” myth is undermining U.S. credibility abroad and hardening an already deteriorating relationship with Pretoria, which rejects the narrative and has instead used the standoff to burnish its own standing as an independent middle power rooted in Global South solidarity.
Jane Munga reviewed Joe Studwell’s book “How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Developmental Frontier.” Munga appreciated the nuance and insight Studwell brought to explaining Africa’s relative poverty through the continent’s demographic history and “low budget” colonialism, moving away from traditional conflict narratives. However, Munga found the book stumbled in its account of potential future economic transformation: digital technology appears throughout the book but is never treated as a central theme, an omission she found particularly glaring.
In the latest edition of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Bailey Schiff argued that the gap in baseline knowledge about Iran’s nuclear capabilities has widened since Iran ended Additional Protocol monitoring in 2021 and then 2025-2026 U.S. and Israeli strikes on its nuclear sites. Schiff highlighted that the new memorandum of understanding with Iran represents a critical juncture in which the U.S. can push for monitoring and verification measures that fill that gap—or risk cementing the present ambiguity for years to come.
And on Rational Security, Anderson sat down with Wittes, Bower, and Feinberg to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including last week’s Supreme Court decisions on executive power, firings at the ODNI, and the supposed reconciliation between Trump and his former lawyer, Michael Cohen.
And that was the week that was.
AN EDUCATED POPULATION IS THE BEST DEFENSE AGAINST ARISTOCRACY
Trump and the Heritage Foundation both know that education is their enemy. Free speech by educated citizens can destroy their plans to turn our country into an autocracy where the ruling power can reshape the country to benefit the wealthy. Trump has dismantled the Department of Education, cut funding for advanced studies at universities, and degraded and controlled elementary education. These changes are all part of the plans promoted in Project 2025.
Compared with other countries, our educational program does not rank among the top 20, with South Korea first and the Nordic countries next. The US and China represent two contrasting educational philosophies. The US system prioritizes decentralization, holistic development, critical thinking, and student-driven exploration. In contrast, the Chinese system employs centralized curricula, intense academic rigor, and a meritocracy heavily driven by high-stakes testing and memorization—University of Colorado.
America is becoming an ignorant population. We are unwilling to invest the effort required to acquire knowledge in any form. We are lazy, and AI will contribute to this lack of education. We are a country whose population thinks in eight-minute segments, the time usually allotted to a TV segment on any show. Our educational process has been described as weak and ineffective, and our colleges as extended day camps. We have discontinued formal standardized testing and reduced the number of science and math courses. Whereas in the past we aimed to ensure that college graduates had a well-rounded education, we now have useless college degrees.
Trump and company have reduced or eliminated funding for advanced studies in the sciences, weather research, and space exploration. Education is now in the hands of the individual states, with no national standard in place, and subject to local reductions in the importance of national educational standards. Local authorities will control the standards in each state and may have no national responsibility. Combine all of this with the erosion of our freedom of speech, and you can see an organized effort to keep our population ignorant.
Other countries, including China, South Korea, Japan, and all the Nordic countries, recognize that the education of their citizens is essential to their survival. Trump is an ignoramus who sees money as the only measure of success and security; he is an example of an uneducated person with false credentials who is an uncontrollable liar and has conned the uneducated 38% into believing he was a successful businessman. He lied about his success as a businessman, and the uninformed, uneducated Americans drank his Kool-Aid and thought that with him in power, they could go about their lives without having to think.