Last week, the Supreme Court heard the case of Ari Zivotofsky, a boy born in Jerusalem whose parents want his country of birth to be listed on his passport. (It currently reads only “Jerusalem.”) The legalities of the case are straightforward: Congress passed a law requiring that such passports read “Jerusalem, Israel”; the executive branch has ignored the law, claiming management of these matters as its prerogative. At issue here, argues Yishai Schwartz, is whether Congress supervises foreign policy, while allowing considerable discretion to the executive, or the president’s power in foreign affairs is absolute. It would be good, writes Schwartz, for the Court to make clear that the Constitution establishes the former view.

On Monday, the Court will have the opportunity to finally weigh these two views of presidential power. The case could not come at a more opportune time. President Obama, especially, has pushed his independent war-making powers to (and some would say beyond) their outer limits. He has stared down congressional hawks over Iran, and may soon try to loosen sanctions unilaterally. Congress and the courts must reassert themselves. This case, where the president is acting in defiance of explicit congressional legislation and where his power is at its “lowest ebb,” is the ideal means to do so.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.