The courts aren’t soft — the whole system is busted. And if we’re being real, people blame the courts because the alternative is uncomfortable: either the system is broken, or the AG’s office isn’t doing its job. Pick whichever one hurts less.

When we talk about how our government works, everything goes back to the Organic Act of 1950. That law didn’t just set up our government; it locked in the whole system we’re still living under today.

The Jones Act has now been in force for over a century. In that time, the fleet it governs has contracted from around 250 ships in the 1980s to fewer than 100 today. The American commercial shipbuilding industry now accounts for approximately 0.2 percent of worldwide ship production.