It is that time again, wherein CBS’s John Dickerson coughs up another pompous editorial from behind the anchor desk on CBS Evening News Plus. This one particularly pompous and lacking self-awareness, but perhaps mindful that there are only so many of these left before Bari Weiss fully takes over as Editor-in-Chief of CBS News.
Watch the full editorial, as aired on CBS Evening News Plus on Wednesday, October 8th, 2025:
JOHN DICKERSON: Sending National Guard troops into an American city is a tragic act. It means civil trust and persuasion have collapsed. Determining whether the president or local officials are responsible for the tragedy lies in the balance between liberty and order. Liberty without order leads to anarchy. No rights are safe. Order without liberty is tyranny. Individual freedom dies. The founders designated local officials closest to the citizens as the primary guardians of this balance. They feared a federal response might be driven by national passions and politics, but sometimes local officials fail. So what should guide a president when he steps in? A constitutional president worries not only about public safety but liberty. Can he picture dissenters as citizens with rights, or only as enemies? Does he reach for force only after all else has failed, or as his first response? A president must act proportionately, measuring both necessity and scope. On necessity, the constitutional threshold is not merely if there is violence in a city, but if local governance has totally collapsed. When, quote, “the ordinary course of judicial proceedings has broken down,” according to the Insurrection Act. But what if the president is the author of disorder? When federal officers describe protests as “low energy”, but the president calls the city “war ravaged”, proportionality is gone. Necessity has been invented, not observed. The second aspect of proportionality is scope is the level of force equivalent to the harm. As Alexander Hamilton put it, “national government action must be proportioned to the extent of the mischief.” The framers built layers of government to make such choices slow, not easy. Killing a fly with a shotgun kills the fly, but the debris is constitutional trust. When the state meets dissent with more force than necessary, instead of persuasion, democracy suffocates. Its oxygen is trust and restraint. Without them, politics becomes an armed monologue. And that’s tonight’s CBS Evening News Plus, I’m John Dickerson. Good night.
The entirety of this editorial can be distilled to “Orange Man Bad for Sending National Guard into Chicago.” This is something that cannot be concealed by the floridity of Dickerson’s prose, or by his historical callbacks.
The entire game is betrayed in the second half of this yap fest, when Dickerson asks “But what if the president is the author of disorder?” These are questions that should’ve been asked four years ago, when President Joe Biden opened the border and allowed the world to vomit itself upon our southern border. That president was the author of the current disorder. What is happening today is in response both to illegal immigration running wild, and to longstanding sanctuary policies in Illinois. But that wasn’t even the most galling part of the editorial.
Dickerson’s sudden concern over the rights of dissenters falls flat. Where was that concern over the rights of dissenters when the FBI spied on Members of Congress? Where was the concern for dissent throughout the Obama administration, when the IRS was sicced on Tea Party-adjacent groups?
Enforcing immigration law is entirely within the province of the Executive, whether Dickerson likes the Executive or not. If local authorities refuse to cooperate with immigration enforcement and place federal agents at risk, the deployment of the National Guard is warranted. So is invocation of the Insurrection Act. Even if it hurts Dickerson’s feelings.
