Kuwait City, Kuwait—“I read your blog post,” Dr. Anood Al-Sharikh told me when we met. “Kuwait isn’t really liberal, but more liberalish, don’t you think?”

She’s right, though in the Middle East even liberalish is a major advance over ugly authoritarian systems like the Saudi theocracy. Kuwait hosts many traditionalists and Islamists who live conservatively, but there is space for most everyone. Many women, like Al-Sharikh hold professional jobs, travel the world, and dress fashionably.

Moreover, politics is freer than elsewhere in the Gulf. Kuwait is ruled by an emir who appoints government ministers, but an elected National Assembly can challenge government ministers and force a cabinet’s resignation. On Tuesday I sat through some the “grilling” of the health minister, a liberal royal who I met last year when he was working in the prime minister’s office. Animated legislators vigorously challenged his performance as well as the arguments of their colleagues while pushing a no confidence motion.

Still, the government clearly has the upper hand, aided by problems elsewhere in the Gulf. A year ago, Kuwait was host to multiple demonstrations by an angry opposition which ranged from secular liberal to Islamist. Today “things have calmed down,” noted Waleed Moubarak of Alghanim Industries. That’s positive, in his view, since you “can only sustain so much political drama.”

But more happened than people being worn out. The authorities “sucked the wind out of” the opposition movement, noted Al-Sharikh. The “government struck back effectively” in a notably illiberal fashion, jailing some people and using its various forms of influence. It even pressed Islamist clerics to issue fatwas against the opposition. Moreover, she asked, “how can anyone in Kuwait be against the government,” which offers jobs, provides homes, pays for education, and more.

Internal contradictions hobbled the opposition: by allying with Islamists, the liberals were effectively promoting a political agenda that included imposing dress codes, closing churches, executing blasphemers, and enshrining sharia as the fount of law. Equally important, the collapse of the Arab Spring had a sobering effect. A bank analyst told me “the public was fed up, it saw chaos in Egypt, violence in Syria, and said that is not for us. People decided there was more to lose than to gain if they went down that particular route.”

In fact, Kuwait well demonstrates the tensions between a democratic polity and liberal society. Thus the “liberalish” country’s fascinating paradox: today, at least, Kuwait’s hereditary emir might be more likely than an elected parliament to encourage development of a free society.

Obamacare’s legal troubles were far from ended when Chief Justice Roberts ruled in 2012 that the law’s “penalty” for failing to buy health insurance was really a “tax,” purportedly rendering the Act constitutional under Congress’s power to tax, even though neither he nor anyone else could say whether the Constitution recognized or allowed so sui generis a tax.

So far is the litigation from over, in fact, that if you’re planning a legal challenge to Obamacare, you’ll have get in line. Two of those in line got good news today: The Supreme Court has agreed to hear their challenges. Both concern Obamacare’s mandate that employer provided health insurance policies cover such things as sterilization, contraceptives, and abortifacients, even in the face of an employer’s religious objections. In Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled for the individual employer. In Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled against the corporate employer. At issue are both constitutional and statutory claims under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).

Ilya Shapiro has discussed the issues more fully here. And earlier on I had a short post on the subject here. The Court will likely hear oral argument in March. Maybe the website will be running by then.

With the dust barely settled following Harry Reid’s bombshell late last week—killing Senate filibusters of appellate court nominees, the obvious purpose of which was to enable the DC Circuit’s eventual rubber-stamping of Obama’s rule by executive order—the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that the Obama administration today “proposed a crackdown on the widespread use of tax-exempt organizations for political campaigning, seeking to reduce the influential role that the secretive groups have played in recent elections.” The timing is exquisite.

It’s hardly news that the administration (and the left generally) is obsessed with limiting political speech—and with the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision in particular. Recall the president’s appalling breach of decorum when in his State of the Union Address two weeks later he ridiculed the captive justices sitting before him, to the cheers of the Democrats standing in applause over them. The obsession has continued, manifesting itself most notoriously in the IRS stonewalling of Tea Party applications for 501(c)4 tax-exempt status. Now, we’re told, the new “guidance” issued today “by the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service would curtail a broad array of these tax-exempt entities’ activities, including campaign advertising, voter registration, get-out-the-vote efforts, and distribution of voter guides and campaign materials”—all designed, one Treasury official said, “to simplify the task of policing the groups for the IRS, by drawing brighter lines.”

Thus, under the current standard, the Journal reports,

a tax-exempt entity could run TV ads in the run-up to an election, congratulating a candidate for introducing a bill, and urging the legislature to enact it into law and viewers to support candidates who back that issue, officials said. Under the new standards, the group wouldn’t be able to count that as exempt activity if it is run within the 60-day or 30-day window.

Groups also are able to do voter registration drives and get out the vote efforts now, as long as it isn’t done in support of a particular candidate. But under the new standard, groups couldn’t do voter registration drives as part of their exempt activity, even voter drives that aren’t overtly partisan or political.

I won’t go into the arcane contribution limits or disclosure requirements that are contemplated by this proposal. But I will note that none of this would be necessary if only we could give directly to candidates and their parties far more than our crabbed current law allows. But that would mean that incumbents would face stiffer competition than they now do under current restrictions. And that’s the dirty little secret of our campaign finance law. It parades as corruption prevention, but at bottom it’s incumbent protection.