Vladimir Putin can win the war he launched a year ago only if Ukraine’s allies choose “to lose by not maximizing” their advantages, contends The Washington Post’s George F. Will. The Russian strongman is “counting on Western publics’ support for Ukraine being brittle, and especially on the multiplication of Josh Hawleys,” the freshman Republican senator and probable “presidential aspirant” who’s “opposing what no one is proposing — giving Ukraine a ‘blank check.’ ” Meanwhile, “the invincibly ignorant Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.)” has 10 GOP co-sponsors for a resolution calling for an end to Ukraine aid. Yet Putin will be “disappointed”: As Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell says, “Look at the top Republicans. . . . They support Ukraine.”

With classified documents found at the homes of President Biden, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, Eli Lake at The Spectator chides, “The US government’s dysfunctional system of state secrecy” is “a far more serious matter than political score-settling”: The “root” of the problem: “overclassification — the national security state has long created far more secrets than it could reasonably be expected to protect” and “lacks an agreed-upon, efficient means of declassification.” Every few years, another bipartisan commission concludes that “excessive secrecy” is “endemic.” The issue should be clear to both parties: “The national security state has protected too many secrets for too many years, and no one has been able to stop it.”

Republicans can use debt-ceiling talks to reclaim the GOP brand as a “party of fiscal responsibility” by learning from the “success of the Reagan era,” one of the “authors of that success,” ex-Sen. Phil Gramm, writes at The Wall Street Journal. The key: accepting “compromises.” “If you can’t compromise, you can’t legislate or govern.” Republicans need to “test” legislation simply by asking “whether the country is better off” with or without it. By doing that, “we can use the debt ceiling to begin to rein in the post-pandemic spending surge now and use the appropriations process to reduce spending even more later.” Republicans may not get “as much as we want, but the country will benefit,” and the GOP can “get in the habit of winning.”

“Republicans who are regularly smeared” by the leftist media “agree to engage them under the premise that they are acting in good faith. That’s a mistake Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his team have proved they know not to make,” cheers The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd. After NBC’s Andrea Mitchell flat-out lied that DeSantis “says that slavery . . . should not be taught to Florida schoolchildren,” when Sunshine State law mandates a curriculum that requires such lessons, his press secretary said DeSantis’ office would give the network no access and then called out Mitchell’s “typical non-apology response that doubles down on the original lie.” Says Boyd: “If other Republicans are serious about winning the culture war and getting the country back on track, they will do the same.”

Libertarian: Free Speech Isn’t a “Civil Right”

One item on recently announced presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s short list of goals “deserves a thorough rebuke,” grumbles Reason’s Stephanie Slade: making political expression “a civil right.” That phrase references the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which constrains what private organizations, such as clubs and businesses, may do. Ramaswamy would have the “government treat political opinions the same way it treats race.” Yet that “would amount to an egregious infringement on the right of free association,” i.e., the right to gather “with others who share our values or beliefs,” such as at a church, club or political-advocacy group. Any government action “that purports to turn ‘political expression’ into a ‘civil right’ is . . . a direct assault on one of the bedrock principles of a free society.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board