Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal arrived last week to an uneven reception. Six contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination endorsed it. Some commentators on the left gushed over it. More on the right and even center-left condemned it. Almost all of them, however, are misunderstanding it.

WASHINGTON — Soon, in a federal court that few Americans know exists, there will come a ruling on a constitutional principle that today barely exists but that could, if the judicial branch will resuscitate it, begin to rectify the imbalance between the legislative and executive branches. It is the “nondelegation doctrine,” which expresses John Locke’s justly famous but largely ignored admonition that institutions like the U.S. Congress, vested with the power “to make laws, and not to make legislators … have no power to transfer their authority of making laws, and place it in other hands.” The doctrine’s revival might result from the Peanut Butter Criterion.

As stories go, the face-off between Jeff Bezos and David Pecker (paging Charles Dickens) has all the elements of a 21st-century battle royale between good and evil, represented by the richest man in the world, who happens to own The Washington Post, and the pied piper of sleaze, respectively.

“We socialists are trying to save capitalism, and the damned capitalists won’t let us.”

Forgive me, but would anybody mind if we declared a moratorium on Democratic apologies?

His tractor is so noisy that, when driving it, the man who calls himself “just a farmer from Butler County” puts his cellphone under his cap, set on vibrate. Charles Grassley, 85, who has served in the Senate longer than all but 11 of the 1,983 other senators — and who still runs 3 miles four mornings a week — does not have ample time for farming because he has visited all of Iowa’s 99 counties every year for 38 years, and last missed a Senate vote 8,300 votes ago, when Iowa was flooded in 1993.

WASHINGTON — In 1983, just before winning a third term as Louisiana’s governor, Edwin Edwards famously said the only way he could lose the race was “if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.”

WASHINGTON — One should never feel sorry for anyone working in President Trump’s White House. They volunteered for this dreadful and chaotic administration. But it’s hard to envy those tasked with writing drafts of his State of the Union address.

WASHINGTON — C.S. Lewis was only partly right when he wrote: The greatest evil … is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.

There was a time not long ago when women in politics were counseled never to speak about their children, if they were moms. A woman needed to seem strong enough for the job. Especially for the male consultants in the room, being a mom read “too soft,” maybe even too weak.