Political Pistachio
By Douglas V. Gibbs
Seven members of Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity, accused in a civil suit by a woman identified only as Jane Doe of drugging and sexually assaulting her in October 2024, is among the latest trending stories. It brings back memories of the Duke lacrosse rape hoax in 2006 that turned out to be a false accusation and criminal case in Durham, North Carolina. One might say it was the case the later MeToo era kept reaching for as its proof text, and the one that keeps showing what happens when belief outruns evidence. That said, I do not want to suggest that the woman in the Cornell 7 case is not being honest. I am only suggesting that in the past, dishonesty has been an issue. As for the Cornell 7 case, the events surrounding the case present their own confused dilemma. We have a district attorney who declined to prosecute, and now the case has been reopened. We have a governor who has appointed the attorney general, Letitia James (you may remember from the Trump Lawfare onslaught) as special prosecutor. And then we have a university and a congresswoman who are now trading accusations over who said what and who is lying about it.
The truth is not typically easy to figure out. There are always many ways of looking at things. I tend to live by the belief that usually there are three sides to every story: What he said, what she said, and what really happened. The interesting thing about the Cornell 7 case is that the facts themselves have taken a life of their own, and they have all sides of the issue scrambling around in political circles and on well-worn narrative trails. Blaze TV Host Jason Whitlock says the case exposes “feminism’s sexual freedom lie.” The left says it exposes patriarchy. Sunny Hostin, a host on The View, and a former sex-crimes prosecutor, has broken from her co-hosts to argue the legal question, while they argue their perception of the moral one. AOC tells the story with a confidence the underlying complaint doesn’t fully carry.
Everyone has a thesis, and the frat house is the evidence.
Here’s what I want to suggest: this case isn’t ultimately about consent law, or Greek life, or even Cornell. It’s about the oldest wound there is. And if we’re honest, more than likely both sides are reading it through a text most of them have never cracked open on purpose.
The text everyone is arguing about without naming is found in Genesis 3:16. God, pronouncing judgment on the woman after the fall from Eden: “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
For most of my life I took that as a soft verse. It was simply a basic description of marriage. Then I learned that serious scholars don’t read it softly at all. The Hebrew word for “desire,” teshuqah, appears only three times in the whole Old Testament, and one of the other two is Genesis 4:7, where sin “desires” Cain and God tells him “you must rule over it.” Same word. Same verb of ruling. Read it that way and the verse becomes a struggle. The word becomes “a desire to control,” met by counter-rule. The ESV Study Bible says it plainly: “an ongoing struggle between the woman and the man for leadership in the marriage relationship.”
That reading was locked in by a woman, Susan Foh, in a 1975 journal article that became the spine of the modern complementarian argument. And once you see it, you can’t unsee the claim that follows: feminism is the curse, formalized into politics. The wife’s cursed instinct to seize the lead, scaled up into a movement.
The other camp reads the same verse upside down. Egalitarian scholars argue that hierarchy itself is a product of the fall – that Eden was partnership and “rule over you” is part of the punishment. On that reading feminism isn’t the disease; it’s the cure, a march back toward Genesis 1 and Galatians 3:28, where there is “neither male nor female.” That, to me, sounds a lot like the WOKE argument in politics and culture today, but we’ll set that one aside for another time.
What I am saying in a general sense is that the same three words produce opposite politics. That should tell you something about how careful we need to be.
I believe The New Testament doesn’t re-impose the curse. It redeems it. Which is a large part of the reason that on that particular part of the mountain, I part company with the extremes on both sides.
The curse says “he shall rule over you,” and the tone of that rule is domination. The man’s fallen version of headship. The New Testament’s answer is not to repeal the wound but to baptize it. Ephesians 5:25: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” Colossians 3:19: “do not be harsh with them.” I Peter 3:7 tells a husband to honor his wife as a fellow heir, and attaches a consequence to failure: your prayers get hindered.
Notice the asymmetry. She submits; he dies. The husband is handed the heavier obligation. The word for him is not “obey.” It’s “give yourself up,” or “die unto yourself” just as we are expected to do for Christ.
The tradition knew this. Chrysostom, preaching on that passage in the fourth century, hammered husbands: you are not a master but a ruler who serves, and you must be willing to lay down your life. Augustine framed the husband’s authority as care, not command. The whole typology runs on it. Husband as Christ, and wife as Church. Christ’s authority was kenotic. He emptied himself. Power that spends itself. The exact inverse of the “barefoot, pregnant, enslaved” caricature presented by some observers, and the exact inverse of the “she exists to serve me” caricature.
These extremes are two ways to fail the same office.
Because, here’s the thing: the chest-beater and the “yes, ma’am” husband are not opposites. They’re the same error in different clothes. Both make the man’s authority about him. The one inflates the office into a throne. The other abandons it into a puddle. Neither is headship.
I don’t believe in “toxic masculinity” as a category that describes all men, but I’ll grant the phenomenon. Some men, desperate to prove they’re the head of something, beat their chests and rule by fiat. And the opposing reaction is just as dangerous: men who fold, who never lead, who think serving means disappearing (or becoming effeminate from the World’s point of view). A wife doesn’t need a tyrant, but she doesn’t need a wet noodle either.
I’ve told my own wife this plainly: yes, a marriage is a union, everything is “ours” – but, that doesn’t mean you stop being who you are. Your distinct taste, your judgment, your personhood: those aren’t feminism. The target isn’t difference. The target is autonomy-as-sovereignty – the modern instinct that my independence is the highest good and the “we” is a threat to it.
Opposites attract for a reason. Those differences are not something to battle over. They are a gift. A demand for sovereignty is the idol.
And I’ve noticed the whole dynamic floating around in my own household. It’s the same argument I think a lot of couples experience; the drift toward “mine” and “his.” A kind of scorekeeping, when the real frame is supposed to be “ours.” That’s not a small thing. That’s the fall’s possessive self, dressed up as empowerment.
My context goes even deeper than that. As a constitutionalist I see the head as a constitutional executive, not a monarch. Understand, I’m a Christian first, a constitutionalist second, and a conservative or Republican third; in that order, deliberately. And the constitutionalist frame is the one that finally made headship make sense to me.
In a constitutional order the executive has a real veto. But he is not sovereign. He is bounded by a higher law, advised by a legislature, and his veto can be reasoned against. That is precisely the biblical structure: In the household scenario, scripture is the constitution which is above the head. The husband is a bounded executive, not an absolute monarch. When he rules by “because I said so,” he has quietly replaced the constitution with himself. The wife is counsel, not a rubber stamp. A good head seeks counsel and can be argued out of his position. The veto is real but rare, reasoned, and reversible. When I “put my foot down,” it should read like a veto message (here’s why, here’s the principle), not a fiat. And after I do it, I keep persuading until she sees it, rather than leaving her under an order.
The foot comes down last, not first. That’s the whole discipline.
Headship isn’t only decisions. It’s spiritual charge. It is ensuring we’re in the Word, and that we are keeping the household oriented. Which means if the family drifts, that’s on me, not her. The office is a burden before it’s a privilege.
Here’s my thesis, and it’s why I keep frustrating people on both sides.
We live in a world that is absolute where it shouldn’t be and not absolute where it should be. The default assumption is often binary: disagree with one camp, and you must belong to its opposite. So if you’re not a feminist you must want women barefoot and pregnant; if you’re not a patriarch you must be a feminist. Both are false.
The camps are poles. Real life happens on the axis. Reality exists along that line that runs through both errors. You can hold real, asymmetric, male headship and insist the head serves like Christ. You can say “feminism bad” and recognize the nuances without concluding that women are the enemy or hopeless unless servile.
I have been told my position is titled “cruciform complementarian.” I suppose. It’s a label, and often I am not much for labels. But, what it means is that leadership entails real headship, and is cross-shaped. Others call it servant headship; the hard-liners will call that mush, but it isn’t, so long as the veto stays real. You can call it benevolent patriarchy if the word doesn’t make you flinch.
The cost is predictable: the hard complementarians will say I’ve gone soft, and the egalitarians will say I’ve gone halfway. That’s not a bug. That’s the signature of holding a real tension instead of resolving it cheaply.
So when the Cornell case burns across the news cycle, understand what’s happening. It’s a live-fire test of the Genesis 3:16 diagnosis. It is a modern example of the oldest argument about the sexes, being run through a frat house in Ithaca. Whitlock is right that something is being sold as empowerment that keeps producing wreckage. The left is right that something in the old order keeps producing wreckage too. Neither is the whole truth, because the whole truth is a curse, and a redemption, and a long road between them.
The case is a symptom, not a proof. But it’s a symptom of something real.
And the answer isn’t to pick a corner and beat your chest. It’s to be, in your own small house, neither tyrant nor wet noodle, but instead a head who serves like Christ and can still, rarely and with reasons, say no.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
By Douglas V. Gibbs
In today’s vernacular, it seems we have a problem with words. The enemies of liberty have a long history of playing with language usage, and this one definitely needs to be addressed. And it’s interesting, because the way our modern understanding of Nationalism and Federalism have landed, it turns out that today the two words actually mean the opposite of what everyone thinks.
The Founding Fathers debated over these words for a decade.
Nationalism seems to be in the news constantly, and we rarely hear “federalism,” and if we do, it is used in a context of federal supremacy. The words in question, here, as a result get used as insults, as banners, and as confusion often by the same people in the same sentence.
So let me illuminate the whole situation a little better by defining them the way the men who wrote the Constitution defined them, because the meaning is not a matter of opinion. It’s a matter of record. And the record is unambiguous.
In the founding era, a nationalist was a man who wanted a consolidated government; one sovereign power over the states, a single “nation” in which the states were subordinate. A federalist was a man who wanted a compact; a union of states that kept their separate sovereignty and delegated only specific, enumerated powers to a central authority. That was the fight. National versus federal. It was the axis of the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, and it was the axis of ratification in 1788.
And here is the detail that proves how real the fight was: the word “national” never appears in the Constitution. Neither does “federal.” The document names “the United States,” “the Union,” a Congress, a President, courts. It refuses to name it a nation. That silence is deliberate. The men who wrote it knew exactly what “national” meant, and they would not concede it in the text. They left the argument open on purpose.
Now understand that the consolidation party did something clever. They called themselves the Federalists.
Think about that. The men who wanted a stronger central government (Hamilton, Jay, Madison in his early nationalist phase) branded themselves with the word that meant the opposite of what they were. The actual federalists, the men who wanted the states to keep their sovereignty, got stuck with the label Anti-Federalists, as if they were the negative, the obstruction, the “anti” party. The consolidationists stole the federal label and have never given it back.
So when you read the Federalist Papers, you are reading the nationalist argument wearing a federalist name. Hamilton in Federalist 78, for example, was arguing for a strong central government, and was selling it under a banner that promised the states would keep their power. It was marketing, and it worked so well that two centuries later we still can’t tell the words apart.
A founding nationalist wanted one thing above all: consolidation. Madison’s Virginia Plan, Hamilton’s June 18 plan, the whole thrust of the strong-government camp was to reduce the states toward subordinate corporations, give the central authority a veto over state law, and make the union a nation. Hamilton openly admired the British model and wanted America to resemble it.
A true founding federalist wanted the opposite: keep the states as the primary political bodies, keep the central government small and enumerated, and treat the union as a compact between sovereign states… which is exactly what Article VII says it is, ratified not by a national plebiscite but by “the Conventions of nine States.”
The winner was a compromise, which is why the Constitution reads the way it does: a federal structure with nationalist machinery built in only for external issues. But, somehow, the nationalist machinery has taken over and has been winning ever since.
Now here’s where the confusion compounds. In the last decade, as a reaction to the rise of Donald J. Trump on the political scene, those who were already standing against constitutional originalism began to throw around a new word: “nationalism.” And there intent was for it to mean something far from what the Founding Fathers meant.
Founding nationalism was about domestic consolidation: one government over the states. The modern usage of the term “nationalism” is about trying to connect it to authoritarianism. Fascism. Identity. Resistance to globalism. Some kind of Master-Race, White-Supremacy racism. That’s a very different idea than what the word “nationalist” meant to the Framers of the Constitution.
Which means the modern Republican who is willing to call himself a “nationalist” is making a claim about foreign policy and identity. Sure, it’s a reaction to being accused of nationalism by their opponents, but both sides are mixing two vocabularies, and the result is that the Democrats claim nationalism is a form of racism, and the Republicans claim nationalism is basically another way of saying “Patriotism,” and they’re both wrong.
An interesting twist for the GOP is that embracing “nationalism” is reversion to type, not a rebellion.
The Republican Party’s direct ancestor is the National Republicans. The party of John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, and ultimately the one that rose in 1854 to serve as an opponent to the pro-slavery Democrats. Those early National Republicans, and the Republican Party that emerged just before the War Between the States was the party of protective mercantilist tariffs, a national bank, federal funding of internal improvements, and a consolidated economic policy. That is the anti-Madison and anti-Jefferson position. The small-government strand in the GOP is the aberration. The nationalism, as defined by the founders, is essentially the birthright of the Republican Party. So when the party picks up the word, it isn’t capitulating to an attack from the left. It’s remembering what it has always been.
And the progressives already owned the word. Theodore Roosevelt literally named his 1910 Osawatomie platform the “New Nationalism.” His brand of progressivism consolidated federal power over the economy, the states, and the individual. Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life, published a year earlier, said the quiet part out loud in six words: “Hamiltonian means to Jeffersonian ends.” That is the progressive creed, and it is a confession that the progressives are the heirs of founding nationalism, not its enemies. Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom” was the ruse that got a lot of it in motion. The administrative state came bounding in after (not that it was anything new, either). The nationalism machinery won regardless of the label.
Now put it on a map. When it comes to the political spectrum, the “left-right dynamic” if you must, if the Constitution is the fixed mark (the standard that sits at the middle, neither left nor right, then “left” and “right” aren’t absolute positions. They’re directions away from the document. To the left of the Constitution is consolidation: more central power, more national government, the states reduced. To the right of the Constitution is a government more limited than the document allows – a stricter reading than the founders wrote. And the modern GOP? It sits between the progressives and the Constitution. Right of the Democrats, yes. But left of the document. Which means the honest label for the modern party is not “constitutionalist,” not “rightwing,” and not even “right.” It’s nationalist, in the founding sense, exactly as Clay meant it.
And on trade, the same precision applies. Free trade is not the founding position, and neither is a reflexive tariff war. The founders wanted fair trade. Reciprocal, protective of the country (not certain industries) when necessary, open when it profited. The modern fight between globalism and protectionism is a fight between two extremes, and the Constitution sits in the middle of it too.
None of this is word games. The whole reason the consolidation of the last century went down so easily is that we lost the vocabulary to describe what was happening. When “nationalist” means “patriot” instead of “consolidationist,” you can’t see the consolidation. When “federalist” means “big government” instead of “compact,” you can’t see the compact being dismantled.
The founders argued over these two words for a decade, and they knew exactly what was at stake. Restore the definitions and the whole history becomes legible again: who wanted what, who won, and which word describes the men holding office today.
Nationalism is consolidation. Federalism is a compact that creates a republican form of government and system. Get those two straight, and you can read two hundred years of American politics in a single sentence.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
By Douglas V. Gibbs
The American founding has two roots. The Saxons brought the first to Britain. Christianity completed it. And the Constitution is the child of both.
There is a popular way of talking about the American founding that traces it almost entirely to the Bible. It is a covenant that connects to Moses, the Ten Commandments, the pulpit, and the Great Awakening. That’s true as far as it goes, and it matters. But it’s only half the story, and the missing half is older than the printing press and deeper than the Reformation.
The other root is the Saxon. The Saxons brought a structure to Britain, a set of institutions and an instinct about law long before they met the Gospel. And when the two finally merged, the structure got its soul and the soul got its structure. Neither one alone produces America. Together, they do.
This is not a competition between the Bible and the Saxons. It’s a compliment. The Saxons supplied the skeleton. Christianity named the source of the rights the skeleton was built to secure.
Let me be precise, because “Saxon” gets thrown around loosely. The Saxons were not ideologues or politicians in the modern sense. What they were was a people with a free man’s order. Theirs was a society built on custom rather than the command of a king, and organized around institutions that carried the instinct for consent of the governed.
They had the witan, the council of wise men whose advice the king was expected to take. They had the folkmoot, the general assembly of the free. They had the hundred moots and shire moots, which were local courts where disputes were settled by the community, which is the ancestor of the jury and of local self-government (localism) itself. They had the fyrd, the levy of armed free men called to defend their own soil, which is the ancestor of the militia. And they had a conception of the king under the law. King Alfred’s own law code bound the crown, and the coronation oath made it explicit. The king did not make the law so much as declare it.
Notice the pattern: local, decentralized, covenanted by oath, and suspicious of consolidated command. Every one of those institutions maps, one to one, onto what the founding generation built: the legislature from the council, the jury and the towns from the moots, the militia from the fyrd, constitutionalism itself from the king under law.
And here is the part that the Bible-only thesis misses: the Saxons already believed their rights were not granted by the king but dispensed from above – a pre-existing order, divine and customary, to which even the ruler was subject. They simply did not yet know the name of the source. That is what the Saxons brought: a structure for liberty, and a conviction that liberty came from God.
Then the Saxons met the Christians, and the ideas got their organizing principle. Alfred the Great’s law code, the oldest sustained English legal text, reveals the truth. He didn’t begin with Saxon custom. He begins with Moses. He opens with the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic law, then layers the Apostolic decrees on top, and only then comes to the customary law of his own people. The very first English lawgiver is telling you, in the architecture of his own code, that the law of England sits beneath the law of God. The rights the Saxons already sensed were divine now had a doctrine, a text, and a name.
That is the merger. The structure was Saxon. The soul was Christian. And once fused, the idea could travel, and it did. It traveled through the common law, through the Magna Carta, and through the long English struggle to hold the crown to the law.
The American founding generation did not invent the “ancient constitution.” They inherited it, and they knew exactly where it came from.
Edward Coke and John Selden, in the seventeenth century, revived the idea that English liberty was older than the Norman conquest, and that pre-Norman England had been a land of free institutions. The Conquest had imposed a foreign feudal yoke. The Levellers carried it into the open. Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government grounded it in first principles. And Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters, read to pieces in the colonies, taught a whole generation of Americans to see their rights as ancient, English, and God-given.
The Founding Fathers read the history directly. Jefferson wanted Anglo-Saxon taught at William and Mary and pushed it into the curriculum, seeing in the Saxons the wellspring of English liberty. John Adams engaged the Saxon and Germanic models head-on in his Defence of the Constitutions. And Montesquieu, the writer the founders quoted more than any other, traced the English constitution itself back to the Germanic forests, where a free people governed themselves before kings learned to command.
So when Americans said their rights were “ancient,” they were citing a lineage that ran through the moots and the witan and the oaths, was baptized into the Christian understanding of a law above the king, and arrived in the New World intact.
If you want the single clearest proof that these two roots grew into one tree, look at a word. The Latin word foedus means covenant; a binding oath between parties. From it comes foederal. Federalism.
The word itself carries the fusion. The biblical covenant, the Mayflower Compact, the New England town covenants, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, Samuel Rutherford’s Lex, Rex with the law above the king and the Saxon tribal oath both landed on the identical principle: self-governing bodies, bound to one another by covenant, resisting consolidated command. Johannes Althusius built an entire political philosophy on it in 1603, grounding the right of local communities in the covenant itself. The American system is the child of that idea.
The Bible-only account gives you the soul but not the skeleton, and a soul without a skeleton can’t stand up in the world. The secular account gives you the skeleton but not the soul, and a skeleton without a soul is a machine. The truth is the merge: the Saxons brought the foundation, Christianity completed and organized it, and the founding generation built on both.
Which is why the assault on the Constitution goes way beyond being some kind of attack in the world of legalism. It was, and is, an assault on a way of being. The Constitution merges all of these things: local, covenanted, God-fearing, and suspicious of distant power. Every consolidation since the 1789 Judicial Act has been an attack on the Saxon layer, dressed up in the language of progress and efficiency. And every defense of the parchment is a defense of that older order, the one the Saxons sensed before they could name it and the Christians named before they could build it.
Two roots. One tree. And the roots are older than the men who wrote the document, and deeper than the men who try to uproot it.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
By Douglas V. Gibbs
Judicial Review is a doctrine the Constitution never named, that arrived by statute, and that has been legitimate ever since only because it kept happening.
There is an argument that says judicial review is a legitimate, even necessary, feature of the American system. It is implied by the structure, assumed by the Framers, and confirmed by long usage. There is a counter-argument, and it is the stronger one, that says judicial review is a power the Constitution never explicitly granted, which seized its authority and then ratified itself by nothing more than its own continued exercise.
It is the cleanest case in the whole constitutional story, and cleaner than any man, because there is no childhood to explain it away. A doctrine has no biography, no ambition, no party, no flaw of character. It is either in the text or it is not. And it is not.
What the doctrine is, in its plainest form, is this: five or nine unelected lawyers in black robes tell the elected branches, and the states, and the people what they think the Constitution means, with no appeal. That is not a small thing. That is the final word on the law of a republic, held by the branch the Constitution gives the least instruction about.
Let me be precise about the record, because the popular myth is that the Framers invented judicial review and handed it down like a birthright.
At Philadelphia, the closest the Convention ever came to judicial review was a proposal called the Council of Revision. Madison and Wilson wanted a joint executive-judicial body that would sit alongside the legislature with a veto over its bills; judges and the president together, reviewing the laws before they took effect. It was a serious idea, advanced by serious men.
And it was beaten. Repeatedly. The Convention took it up on June 4, 1787, and rejected it. It came back on July 21 and was rejected again. It returned on August 15, with compromise variants, and lost once more. The delegates kept reaching for a judicial check on lawmaking and kept declining to put it in the document.
What they ratified instead was Article III. And Article III does something remarkable: it gives federal judges tenure during good behavior and protection from salary cuts, and then it says almost nothing about what those judges may do to a law they believe is unconstitutional. Read Article III for yourself. There is no clause that says the Supreme Court may strike down an act of Congress. There is no clause that says it may strike down a state law. The power is simply assumed into existence by silence.
The men we call Anti-Federalists are treated as the losers of 1787, the sore losers of 1788. But they saw the machine better than the men who built it.
Robert Yates, writing as Brutus, published his fifteenth paper in March 1788, and in it he did not merely oppose the new court, he described the future. He warned that a court with final authority to interpret the Constitution would construe the text in the direction of federal power, would “mould” the Constitution to its own purposes, and would absorb the states in the process. He was far from guessing. He was reading the structure and predicting where it led.
More than two centuries later, the prediction is not a prediction. It is the evening news. The Court that Yates feared is the Court we have, and the states he worried would be absorbed have been absorbed. He was right on the mechanism, right on the direction, and right on the outcome. And almost nobody reads him.
If the Anti-Federalists supplied the warning, Hamilton supplied the sales pitch, and it is one of the most quietly dishonest pieces of writing in the Federalist Essays.
Federalist #78 is where Hamilton argues that the judiciary is the “least dangerous” branch, because it holds neither the purse nor the sword. No money. No army. No enforcement arm. A branch that can neither spend nor fight, he says, cannot threaten anyone. It will have “neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.”
Read that as reassurance if you like. But notice what Hamilton is doing in the same essay: he is handing that supposedly powerless branch the power to void the acts of the two branches that do hold the purse and the sword. The least dangerous branch, in Hamilton’s own framing, gets to overrule the most dangerous ones. He describes a servant and quietly installs a referee with veto power over the whole game.
This is the same Hamilton who spent ratification pretending to be a friend of the Constitution as written, and then spent the rest of his life working to consolidate it into something else. Federalist #78 is that Hamilton in miniature: the man who tells you the thing is harmless while he slides it the knife.
Here is the detail that settles the argument. Judicial review did not come through the amendment process. It began as ordinary legislation, and was codified by the court’s self-administration.
The Judiciary Act of 1789 passed in the very first session of the first Congress, before the ink on the parchment of The Constitution was dry. It created the federal court structure, and in its twenty-fifth section, it gave the Supreme Court appellate reach over the decisions of state courts when a federal question was involved. That section is the real engine of consolidation. It is how the federal judiciary got its hands on state law, and through it, on the states themselves. An event that began the attack on the states that culminated largely with the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913.
The power of Judicial Review began operating before it was ever announced. In Hylton v. United States (1796), the Court reviewed the constitutionality of a federal tax. In Calder v. Bull (1798), it reviewed a state law. In both cases the Court upheld what it examined, so nobody noticed the magnitude of what was happening. The power was quietly running for years before Marbury v. Madison (1803) finally stood up and declared it aloud.
By the time Marshall said the words in Marbury, the thing was already alive. He did not invent it. He named it.
Which brings us to the man who tells us the truth about judicial review without meaning to: John Jay, the first Chief Justice.
Jay resigned the Chief Justiceship in 1795 to become Governor of New York. In 1800, as his governorship wound down, John Adams nominated him to the Court a second time. The Senate confirmed him. And Jay turned it down.
His reason, in his letter to Adams dated January 2, 1801, is the tell. He wrote that he had “left the Bench perfectly convinced that under a System so defective” the Court “would not obtain the energy, weight, and dignity which are essential to its affording due support to the national government.”
Notice what he is not saying. He is not complaining that the Court has too much power. He is complaining that it has too little. The Court, as built, was beneath him. It was not weighty enough. Not powerful enough. Not consequential enough to be worth his time. He would rather govern a state.
So here is the honest witness: the first Chief Justice of the United States, a man who understood exactly what the Court could become, saw that it wasn’t there yet, judged it beneath his ambition, and went to get real power elsewhere. Judicial review is not complicated. It is about power. And Jay tells us so in a resignation letter.
Put it together and judicial review stands as its own character in the constitutional drama. It is not the product of a lone villain, but an idea that won by accretion. It was a power reached for at the Convention in 1787 and refused. It was warned against by men who saw it clearly. It was sold to the public as a harmless servant. It was delivered quietly by statute. It was practiced in the shadows for years. It was announced aloud only after it was already alive. And it was defended, in the end, by the simple fact that it had been done and nobody was able to stop it – and trust me, Thomas Jefferson tried.
It is the deepest strain on constitutional originalism precisely because it is self-ratifying. A person can be measured against the text and found wanting. But judicial review is the thing that decides what the text means, and it decided, in its own case, that it belongs. That is a power telling you it has the power. And we have believed it for two hundred years.
The Convention refused to put it there, and the men who saw it coming were the ones history forgot. The very first law of the new government opened the door. Before the ink was dry.
One of the more revealing moments in my years behind a microphone came when Dr. Larry P. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, joined me on my terrestrial radio program. We were talking about the Constitution, and the subject of judicial review came up, and to my genuine surprise, a man of his learning and standing defended it. So I asked him two questions, not as a trap, but because the logic had never sat right with me, and the answers he gave led him to a conclusion even he seemed not to have expected. The exchange is worth retelling, because it exposes in two questions what volumes of scholarship have managed to obscure.
I asked him if the Constitution establishes a limited government. He said, “Yes.”
I asked him, “If the federal government can use its own federal court system to determine the constitutionality of its own laws, is that not the government deciding for itself its own authorities? And if so, how is that limited government?”
Silence followed.
He had no answer because the very basic foundation of our constitutional republic is that the federal sovereign has no authority to judge its own reach.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
By Douglas V. Gibbs
The Department of Justice launched a nationwide probe into the practice of the mutilation of children’s private parts in 2025. One of the dominoes to fall is NYU Langone Health. After a subpoena by the Trump administration for medical records regarding transgender treatment for minors, while denying any wrong-doing, NYU Langone agreed to end transgender medical procedures for minors, and pay the U.S. Department of Justice $8.5 million in a settlement to avoid releasing the records and enduring what would have been lengthy litigation. NYU Langone is the sixth major hospital system to reach an agreement like this with the Trump administration.
Under the deals made with the Department of Justice, the hospitals may no longer administer puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or perform transgender surgeries on minors.
What about all of the gender-affirming information we’ve been hearing for all these years? Were they lies? We were told that “gender-affirming care” saves these poor misunderstood people from mental health issues, that it reduces the chance of suicide by transgender individuals, and anyone who disagrees with that narrative is a bigot and seeks to kill these poor children. “Do you really want these poor children to die? It’s a matter of life and death!”
“Do you want a living daughter or a dead son?” was the question often asked. During a case before the United States Supreme Court in 2024, Justice Samuel Alito said, “But on page 195 of the Cass Report, it says there is no evidence that gender affirming treatments reduce suicide.” In May of 2024, a study showed the risk of suicide actually increased 12-fold following a transgender surgery. A newer study shows that restrictions on puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries for minors did not increase suicide rates in teens. According to the New York Post, “We ran the data on trans teen suicide panic, and found the claims are misleading.”
Not only is the narrative inaccurate, but it is misleading. Is that purposeful deception? Do children, illegal aliens, the homeless, and prisoners really need the taxpayers to pay for their junk to be chopped off? Maybe, and I know to my leftist readers this might sound crazy, but is it possible that the best thing for a child is to leave their private parts alone, and let them continue to grow and learn and develop without taking knives to them?
A study was conducted by Kingsbury, Greene, and Do No Harm used CDC using data on actual teen suicide rates and they looked at the 23 states where some or all treatments were restricted for patients under 18. That trend started in 2022, and in the four years since, the study found zero evidence that state policies led to increased suicide rates.
Greene and Kingsbury wrote about the study for The New York Post: Activists and their allies may object that our findings neatly conform to our organization’s goal of ending transgender medicine for minors. That’s why our report carefully details our methodology — and even contains the data and code we used in our statistical software. We made our results, our methods and our data completely public so that others can conduct their own analyses to validate our findings. Transgender activists will continue to use the threat of suicide as a means of bludgeoning society into accepting invasive, irreversible medical interventions for children. But unless they can produce evidence for a relationship between state restrictions and suicides, their tactics should be called out for what they are: A manipulative bluff. Parents and policymakers, armed only with common sense, can’t be blamed for buckling when confronted with a dishonest nightmare scenario. Now they have the facts they need to protect children at home, at school and by law.
As for the argument that “bigotry against transgender individuals” is a primary cause of the murder of transgender persons, a Manhattan Institute report has confirmed what reality has been showing us for years: Transgender-identified people are murdered at a lower rate than the general population, their killers are usually people who know them (often intimately), and transphobia isn’t really the motive when these terrible things happen.
From Post Millennial: The report examined over 300 homicides involving transgender victims going back to 2015. Among cases with an identified suspect, 65 percent of those suspects were black, and 18 percent were white … Only 3.3 percent of the cases reviewed in the report turned out to be confirmed hate crimes. ‘The leading identified circumstance of the murders was instead intimate partner violence,’ the researchers wrote. ‘Other common circumstances included sex-work encounters, disputes, robbery, and other forms of interpersonal conflict.’
A study out of Finland found in persons under age 23 who went to gender clinics that psychiatric treatments increased greatly for both boys and girls after they began visiting these clinics. In other words, gender-reassignment worsens mental health conditions, not helps as we’ve been told.
Mental Health and Suicide Risk were the moral basis for operating on perfectly healthy genitalia on kids, changing the child’s sex clinically in a manner that can’t be changed back, and it was all a great deception.
So why are Democrats, Socialists and other left-leaning ideologies still supporting the transgender madness as all of their arguments crash and burn? It’s not some new civil rights movement that they claim it to be. It’s a money-making operation that sacrifices children and God’s Creation (two sexes, male and female) because they hate God and want government to reign over you with an iron fist and a steel scalpel. And, they still support the issue because it pays, and it pays big.
According to Vice President J.D. Vance who is directing the Department of Justice federal criminal investigation into transgender healthcare providers, they have been “falsifying billing codes to get insurance to cover the cost of ‘transgender’ medical interventions for children… [and] defrauding Medicaid.” An HHS report revealed that “doctors and hospitals have filed roughly $120 million in insurance claims related to child ‘transgender’ medical procedures since 2019, noting that more than 225 hospitals and health systems set up pediatric transgender clinics from 2015 to 2025. The report alleges the revenue resulted from “over 5,500 surgical procedures and 8,500 courses of opposite-sex hormones and puberty blockers.”
The report goes on to explain that the clinics in question “used misleading or potentially fraudulent diagnostic and procedural codes” to obtain insurance payments for the interventions, which include mastectomies and vaginoplasties. For example, there was a 30 percent increase in billing for “endocrine disorder, unspecified” from 2020 to 2022, while fewer than 5 percent of patients with that code really had endocrine disorders.
Over the past 10 years, doctors used this generic code to give puberty blockers to hundreds of children ages 9-17 who should have been coded as having gender dysphoria, raking in $42.6 million, according to the report. The majority of the claims were paid by insurance companies, but about $7.8 million was paid by Medicaid.
For transgender-related interventions alone, lifetime health care cost totals for patients who start to “transition” as children can be up to $75,000 “even without surgeries.” With surgeries, it can skyrocket to $170,000 per patient. Even that is before separate therapies like “fertility preservation (egg or sperm banking), voice therapy, hair removal,” or even attempts at reversal through detransitioning.
It’s the ultimate sucker-punch. We go to the doctor seeking care from them so that they can help us with pain or illness, and they respond by calling for expensive treatments and surgery for a sexual identity dysphoria mental condition likely brought on by external forces at school or in politics. They have used deception, and the willingness to destroy lives as young as pre-school, to line their pockets. The path of destruction means nothing to them, and they stand up there at podiums and lie about it and a bunch of virtue signally idiots fall for it and even now as it is all crumbling under the weight of investigation and studies they continue to shake their fists and call anyone who disagrees with their carnage a bigot and a fascist.
It’s a booming industry based on lies and the destruction of body parts – and they are even willing to go after our kids to accomplish it all. The real question is, how many of these politicians and people who are greatly influential in the medical industry are lining their pockets with incredible amounts of money in addition to those performing the barbaric procedures? And mind you, this road to madness began when we began trying to normalize homosexuality.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
By Douglas V. Gibbs
Are we built on the rock or, the sand? The Founding Fathers understood through their own Faith that America’s Unchanging God had a hand in their endeavors. I feel like we’ve forgotten those basic principles. We’ve gone from critical thinking and a solid foundation to shifting sands and a foundational crisis.
We must begin our road to understanding with a basic declaration that has somehow become counter-cultural: God is not like us.
The modern world has fashioned a deity in its own image, and has given God human attributes. According to modern scholars, we have an anxious God who learns, who suffers with the age, and who revises His promises when the culture shifts. This is the God of therapeutic religion, the “crucified God” who bleeds with history rather than governing it. In their eyes, He is a He/She/They cosmic therapist who validates rather than saves.
We must reject this idol.
The God of the Scriptures, and of the Founders, is without body, parts, or passions. He does not discover; He decrees. He does not react; He rules. When Genesis says He “repented” of making man, it accommodates our language; it does not report a divine mood swing. When Hosea says His heart “recoils,” it describes the effect of His unchanging justice, not a fluctuation in His being.
He is the Rock. Not a drowning lifeguard swept away by the same current that drowns us, but the granite foundation upon which everything stands or falls.
This is not cold theology. It is the only theology that makes love trustworthy. A God whose mercy depends on His emotional state is a God who might withdraw it tomorrow. A God who can be wounded by His creatures is a God held hostage by His world. We need a Savior stronger than our suffering. He must be one who can pull us out without going under Himself.
This God (impassible, immutable, sovereign) is the foundation upon which America was built. Not because the Founders were all orthodox Christians (they were not), but because they built upon classical theism whether they fully knew it or not.
If God is unchanging, then truth is unchanging. If truth is unchanging, then rights are not grants of government but endowments of the Creator. If rights precede the state, then the state is limited by something higher than itself. And if the state is limited, then liberty is possible.
This is why the Declaration of Independence appeals to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and closes with “firm reliance on the protection of divine providence.” They were not merely being pious. They understood God’s Covenant, His Love, His Care for His Creation, and the foundational beams that would become the United States Constitution. Only a God who cannot change can guarantee that “unalienable rights” will remain unalienable when the political winds shift.
The balance they achieved (a Christian country that was not theocratic, a strong but limited system, federal yet the states remained sovereign) reflects their understanding of transcendence. God is above the chaos of human affairs, yet intimately concerned with justice. Our system of a federal government, supreme in its duties, leaves the local issues to the states.
The Founding Fathers divided power because they knew man is fallen. The reality of human nature guided their decisions. They limited government because they knew God is sovereign. They led with religion because they knew the state could not save, nor survive without God’s Hand.
The Founding Fathers thought in biblical categories even when they didn’t realize it.
When Jefferson wrote of “self-evident” truths, he echoed Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God.” Truth written into creation, discernible by reason, not imposed by authority.
When they declared independence from a tyrant, they stood on Psalm 2: “Why do the nations rage… He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh.” No earthly power is ultimate. The Rock remains when kingdoms crumble.
When they established checks and balances, they enacted Psalm 33: “The Lord bringeth the counsel of the heathen to nought.” Human schemes fail; divine purposes stand. Divided power acknowledges that no man can be trusted with absolute authority because no man is absolute.
The hymn “How Great Thou Art” captures what they knew: “When I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds Thy hands have made… Then sings my soul.” Creation implies a Creator. Wonder implies transcendence. And transcendence implies limits… on us, and on our institutions.
But here is the crisis: We have traded the Rock for the sand.
Modern America has embraced the passible God. A humanly devised deity who evolves, who suffers, who changes with the culture. And having abandoned the unchanging God, we have abandoned the possibility of unchanging truth.
If God is malleable, law is malleable. If law is malleable, rights are privileges granted by the state – and what the state grants, the state can revoke. We have replaced “endowed by their Creator” with “evolved by consensus,” and the result is tyranny wearing the mask of compassion.
We see it everywhere:
Judicial activism: courts creating law rather than applying it, because we have come to believe that if the Constitution is “living and breathing,” it is dying. Only dying things change their meaning with every generation.
Administrative overreach: unelected bureaucrats wielding legislative, executive, and judicial power combined, because we have forgotten that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The erosion of federalism: the states reduced to administrative districts, the Senate made a popular body (1913), the Tenth Amendment a dead letter. When the center cannot hold because we no longer believe in a Center above us, everything flies apart.
The transformation of God-given Rights to Government-defined and distributed rights. False promises. False guarantees. New “rights” seem to be discovered weekly, which means rights are no longer grounded in nature or nature’s God, but in human desire. And desire is fickle.
This is the pattern of fallen civilizations. Rome traded its republic for an emperor when the people demanded bread and circuses. France traded its monarchy for the Terror when they made man the measure of all things. We are trading our Constitution for administrative tyranny because we have made God in our image, and a God who looks like us cannot save us from ourselves.
We are a ticking time bomb. Either we rediscover the truth, or we fade away as Babylon faded, as Rome faded, as every civilization that forgot the Rock has faded.
The rediscovery must be theological before it can be political. How can we get out political house in order if we can’t get our religious house in order? We must return to the God who cannot be destabilized by our suffering, who does not change His mind when we rebel, whose promises are not reactionary feelings but eternal decrees. We must recover the God of the hymn; the awesome, transcendent, unchanging Lord who “the universe displays.”
Only then can we recover the architecture He made possible: limited government, divided power, federalism, enumerated rights, and the confidence that “providence” still protects those who rely on Him.
The alternative is clear. A passible God produces a passible constitution. It then becomes a constitution that changes with every emotional surge of the culture. And a constitution that changes with the culture is not a constitution at all. It is merely the temporary advantage of the powerful, dressed in legal language.
Other civilizations have faced this moment. Some recovered. Most perished. The difference was whether they remembered the Rock from which they were hewn.
We stand at that same fork. The God of our fathers (impassible, immutable, sovereign) still reigns. The question is whether we still want Him to.
“He only is my rock and my salvation; He is my fortress; I shall not be moved.” — Psalm 62:6
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary