There are laws whose purpose is an unalloyed good, such as the Civil Rights Act. There are others whose origins are definitively gray, and whose utilization has put them in support of both justice and injustice, and whose use is more a measure of the person wielding the law than the contents of the legislation. Consider the uses of the Insurrection Act.

Then there are laws that seem at best misguided, and at worse, simply bad—like the Smith Act.

At least 159 people remain unaccounted for in the Champlain Towers South condo collapse, with four reported dead as of this writing.

“We have a deal,” President Joe Biden announced Thursday, celebrating the framework of a bipartisan infrastructure deal worth $1.2 trillion, only about $580 billion of which would be new spending.

“They have my word, I’ll stick with what they’ve proposed,” Biden said, flanked by a core group of Senate Democrats and Republicans. “And they’ve given me their word as well. Where I come from, that’s good enough for me.

The Insurrection Act, allowing the president to deploy military forces within the United States, was signed into law in 1807. Of the course of that 214 history, the law has been used for vastly different purposes. In 1871, Ulysses Grant used it to position federal forces against the Klu Klux Klan after Klansmen conducted waves of lynchings killing thousands, including hundreds of Black politicians, across the South.

Just over a month ago, the world was looking upward to see where a large booster—the first stage of a Chinese Long March 5B—was going to fall to Earth. Despite a lot of publicity, and a good deal of resulting anxiety, most of the booster burned up in the atmosphere somewhere near the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, and there did not appear to cause any resulting damage.