The U.S. Constitution

The Supreme Court Just Rewrote the Rules for Therapy Bans

Colorado tried to do what many states have done over the last decade: use professional licensing law to block licensed counselors from performing so-called “conversion therapy” on minors. On March 31, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court said Colorado went too far, at least under the legal test the...

A Supreme Court Test for Gun-Industry Immunity

Congress does not pass many laws that announce their purpose as plainly as the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005. Supporters of the law have long described the idea in straightforward terms: if a firearm is made and sold legally, and then later misused by a criminal, the...

Gerrymandering Explained

Gerrymandering is what happens when the people who draw election districts choose their voters before voters choose them. More literally: it is the deliberate shaping of district boundaries to tilt election outcomes. Sometimes the goal is partisan advantage. Sometimes it is to weaken the voting...

How Congress Works

Congress looks like a marble monument on the outside. On the inside, it runs like a busy workplace with calendars, managers, deadlines, and constant negotiations. The Constitution sets the basic structure in Article I, but the day-to-day reality is built from rules, committees, party leadership,...

House vs. Senate: Key Differences

Congress has two chambers that do the same job in very different ways. The House of Representatives is built for speed, population, and political responsiveness. The Senate is built for stability, smaller-state influence, and longer-term bargaining. If you have ever wondered why a bill can sail...

Arrested by an Algorithm

A warrant is supposed to be the Constitution’s way of forcing the government to slow down, look closely, and justify itself. It is the point where suspicion has to harden into something more than a hunch. So what happens when a warrant is influenced by a machine’s “maybe,” and that maybe...

ICE at the Airport: Emergency Patch or New Normal?

Airports are one of the few public spaces where Americans already accept a heavy federal footprint as the price of safety. Metal detectors, ID checks, pat downs, no liquids, no jokes about bombs. We have lived inside that bargain for a generation. Now comes a new question, sharpened by a government...

Election Law Fights Headed to Court in 2026

Every midterm election is a civic stress test. In 2026, some of the most consequential arguments may unfold away from rallies and debates, in courtrooms, where voting rules are often contested. Because the details differ by state and by lawsuit, what follows is not a recap of any single docket. It...

ICE at the Airports Is a Dry Run for the Midterms

When federal immigration agents start showing up where ordinary civic life happens, the question is rarely just why they are there. The question is what we are being trained to accept. Democracy lawyer Ian Bassin, a co-founder of Protect Democracy, has been blunt about what he thinks is happening:...

ICE at Airports After TSA Pay Returns: A Civil Liberties Question

Airport security lines have been the most visible sign of the ongoing Department of Homeland Security funding breakdown. But a quieter change may outlast the paycheck crisis: federal immigration agents were brought into airports to help cover staffing gaps, and the administration is now signaling...

Elk v. Wilkins and the New Birthright Citizenship Fight

The Fourteenth Amendment sounds simple until you reach the phrase that does all the work. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” For more than a century, Americans have mostly treated that sentence as a...

Washington, D.C. is not just the seat of the federal government. It is where federal power gets questioned in public, under oath, and on a timetable that can move far slower than politics. Right now, that timetable is colliding with major parts of President Trump’s second-term agenda. In case...

Every generation gets its own version of the same civic argument: Where does a constitutional right end, and where does the government’s power to manage public spaces begin? This month, that argument moved into a particularly ordinary place with an unusually sharp legal edge, the neighborhood...

The Supreme Court is about to do something it has largely avoided for generations: squarely decide what the Constitution’s Citizenship Clause requires in the modern immigration era. On Wednesday, the justices will hear arguments over President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at narrowing...

Judge Orders Attorney Access at Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’

A federal judge has issued a pointed reminder to Florida’s Everglades immigration detention facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz”: detention does not come with a pause button for lawyer access. U.S. District Judge Sheri Polster Chappell has entered a preliminary injunction requiring the...

How Government Shutdowns Work

A “government shutdown” sounds like the United States simply turns the lights off. That is not how the Constitution designed the federal government to function, and it is not how modern budgeting actually works. A shutdown is really a legal event: at a certain moment, some parts of the federal...

Continuing Resolutions Explained

Every fall, Washington runs into the same cliff. The federal fiscal year starts on October 1. Agencies need legal authority to obligate and expend funds on October 1. And in many years in recent decades, Congress does not finish the regular appropriations bills in time. So Congress reaches for a...

Lame Duck President: What It Means and What They Can Still Do

The morning after Election Day, the losing president does not instantly become powerless. The cameras may pivot to the president-elect, donors may scatter, and party leaders may start talking like the next administration is already here. But constitutionally, the sitting president remains the...

What Is a Super PAC and How Does It Work?

Americans tend to talk about money in politics like it is one big, shadowy bucket. But election law does not treat political spending as one thing. It sorts it into categories, draws bright lines between some of them, and then spends the next decade litigating whether those lines still mean...

What Is a Lame Duck President (or Congress)?

A lame duck is an elected official who is still in office, but is on the way out. They either lost reelection, chose not to run again, or are term-limited, and everyone in Washington knows their time is expiring. The phrase sounds like a joke, but the situation is real power plus declining...