Governments have wanted to know who owns what for about as long as governments have existed. Caesar Augustus ordered the whole Roman world registered so it could be taxed, the story that puts a pregnant woman on a donkey to Bethlehem in the Gospel of Luke. Rome wanted names attached to property because names attached to property are names you can tax, conscript, and control. That instinct never went away. It just got better paperwork.

In 1846, New York tore up the old way of putting judges on the bench. Judges would face voters, just like everyone else in government. Nineteen states called constitutional conventions between 1844 and 1853 largely to copy that reform, and from 1846 to 1860, only two states even proposed keeping the old appointive system on the books. Voters rejected both. Americans decided, almost unanimously, that if a judge could rule on your life, your land, and your laws, that judge should have to answer to you. This week, Kansas walked away from that promise.

A Maryland public school changed a child's name and pronouns behind her parents' backs. The parents found out by accident, through a lab class email. Now they are suing, and the Trump administration is threatening to pull the district's federal funding. That story out of Anne Arundel County is not an isolated glitch. It is the logical end point of a fight that has been running for a century, one most parents never knew was happening until it landed in their own inbox.

Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday and refused to answer more than one hundred questions. One hundred and eleven times, by the official count, America's most famous bureaucrat hid behind the Fifth Amendment rather than explain himself to the people who paid his salary for over fifty years. Anyone on the right claiming the autopen alone makes Fauci's pardon "void" is overstating the law and handing the left an easy fact check to hide behind. But that is not actually the scandal, and Republicans should stop pretending it is.