Houston's city council spent an August afternoon doing what governments do best. It found a real problem, reached for the biggest possible hammer, and congratulated itself on compassion while sending the bill to the very people it claimed to help.

A woman orders a pill online, answers a few questions nobody verifies, and receives a drug capable of ending a pregnancy and, if something goes wrong, sending her to the emergency room alone. No doctor has to see her face. No pharmacist has to check her age, her gestational stage, or whether she lives in a state where the drug is even legal. This is not a hypothetical. It is the finding of a Senate investigation released this week, and the companies making a fortune off that arrangement cannot even tell Congress who is writing the prescriptions.

Hawaii spent years telling its own citizens that the Second Amendment stopped at the front door of every grocery store, restaurant, and shopping mall in the state unless the owner explicitly said otherwise. In June, six justices of the United States Supreme Court told Hawaii, and four other states running the same scheme, that they were wrong.

The United States national debt broke $40 trillion this month. Nobody in Washington called an emergency session. Nobody canceled a vacation. The Treasury simply confirmed it, the press ran the number for a news cycle, and Congress went back to arguing about everything except the one number that will determine whether your grandchildren inherit a republic or a receivership.