The retreat, as reported by NPR, is welcome. A federal judge pressed the Justice Department hard enough that it abandoned its subpoenas for the testimony and phone records of New York Times journalists. That outcome is the right one. But I would ask every citizen to look past the outcome and study the attempt — because the attempt is where the danger lives.

I held, and hold still, that a free press is the last sentinel of liberty. Not a perfect sentinel — I knew, from long experience, that newspapers print error, partisanship, and malice alongside truth. Yet I concluded, and would conclude again, that a society which silences its journalists to protect its government has its priorities exactly reversed. It is the government that must be watched, not the watcher.

The instrument here — the grand jury subpoena — deserves particular attention. A grand jury is meant to be a shield for the citizen against the arbitrary power of the state. When the state turns that instrument back against the very citizens who inform the public about state conduct, it has converted a shield into a sword. That is precisely the sort of legal sleight-of-hand that concentrated executive power will always discover, and always find convenient.

I note — as inference, not recollection — that this episode almost certainly did not begin and end with two subpoenas. Wherever an administration learns that subpoenas against journalists invite judicial resistance, it will search for quieter methods: surveillance, source exposure through other channels, the soft intimidation of knowing one is watched. The rollback of a single legal filing should not be mistaken for a renunciation of the underlying appetite.

What is the remedy? The same remedy it has always been: an educated citizenry that reads, that argues, that insists that its representatives explain themselves in public. Courts can and did push back here — and that is exactly what an independent judiciary is for. But courts alone cannot sustain a free press; the people must value the press enough to defend it when it is inconvenient, especially when the reporting embarrasses causes they themselves support.

A government that prosecutes its critics always begins by prosecuting only the ones its supporters already distrust. It never stops there. That is the lesson of every republic that has let this power grow uncontested. The judge asked the hard questions this time. The question for the Republic is whether the citizenry will keep asking them long after the subpoenas are gone.