The U.S. Constitution

What Voters Can Blame Presidents For

Midterms are America’s constitutional stress test. Not because the Constitution mentions “midterm elections” as a special category, but because the structure practically dares voters to send a message halfway through a presidency. When prices climb and paychecks feel smaller, voters do what humans...

Susan Collins and the Price of “Moderation”

Americans love a comforting story about politics. The independent-minded senator. The brave centrist. The reluctant partisan who just cannot bring herself to go along with the worst impulses of her party. Susan Collins has lived inside that story for decades, and she has profited from it. Maine...

Can One State Force Another to Honor a Carry Permit?

If you want to understand America, watch what happens at state borders. A line on a map can turn a legal act into a felony, and it can happen in the space of a highway exit. That is the quiet tension behind the next big concealed-carry question: can a state refuse to recognize a concealed-carry...

Murphy’s “Regulate the Internet” Remark and the First Amendment

When lawmakers talk about “regulating the internet,” it can sound like a simple fix for a complicated civic problem. But constitutionally, it is anything but simple. Sen. Chris Murphy recently argued on the “I’ve Had It” podcast that government should take on projects that reduce loneliness and...

Susan Collins and the Price of a Vote

Here is the civics question nobody in Washington likes to answer out loud: How much is a senator’s “independence” worth when the money shows up right before the budget add does? Sen. Susan Collins has built an entire brand on being the grown-up in the room. The reasonable Republican. The one who...

When Gunshots Become Data: Flock Alerts and the Fourth Amendment

You can hear a sound without searching anyone. That is the common-sense starting point. But modern policing is building a new chain of inference: a “bang” becomes a digital alert, the alert becomes a mapped “event,” and the event becomes a database query that can surface a list of vehicles that...

Home Heating Oil Reserves and Presidential Power

When senators urge a president to “release the home heating oil reserve,” the phrasing is often imprecise. They are not talking about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on the Gulf Coast, or a federal stockpile of gasoline. They usually mean one small, purpose-built program created for one problem and...

The First Circuit’s Deportation Ruling, Explained

Deportation sounds, in political shorthand, like a single government action: you are “removed,” and that is the end of the story. In reality, deportation is a chain of smaller legal decisions. Where will you be sent? What if you face persecution or torture there? What if you have new, material...

The Senate’s College Sports Vote: What Could Change for NIL and Transfers

College sports used to be governed by a familiar arrangement: the NCAA wrote the rulebook, schools handled day-to-day compliance, and conferences often supported enforcement in uneven ways. States mostly stayed out of the way. NIL changed that. Transfers changed that. And lawsuits, especially...

What Can the President Actually Do on Tariffs, AI, and China?

Summits make presidential power look like a single lever. A leader flies in, doors close, statements come out, markets move. But the Constitution does not give the president a “China policy” button. What it gives is a set of shared powers that pull against each other: Congress writes the rules of...

What Happens When a Surrogate Refuses an Abortion?

You can write many things into a surrogacy contract. Parties often plan for hospital choice, prenatal testing, travel, bed rest, and who gets to cut the umbilical cord. But enforceability varies widely by state, and some provisions are limited or void as a matter of public policy. What you cannot...

Can Congress Block a Federal Anti-Fraud Division?

You can create a “division” with a press conference. You cannot create one that actually investigates fraud, hires staff, compels documents, and brings cases without running into the Constitution’s basic architecture: Congress writes the laws, Congress controls most federal spending through...

The Senate Filibuster, Statehood Math, and What the Constitution Actually Says

Every few years the filibuster reappears as a political cliffhanger: keep it, kill it, carve exceptions, or watch it block everything. This time the argument is tied to a second question that feels separate but is not: statehood for Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Put them together and you get a...

Who Controls Data Centers?

Data centers used to be the kind of infrastructure most Americans never had to think about. They were “somewhere else,” tucked into an industrial park, out by an airport, or behind a fence with a logo and a generator hum you could ignore. AI changed that. Training and running large models demands...

EPA Rollbacks, Ratepayers, and the Limits of Agency Power

When an administration announces an EPA “rollback,” the headline usually comes with a second promise: lower costs. Sometimes the number is enormous. Sometimes it is framed as immediate relief for households. But the Constitution does not contain an “EPA switch” the President can flip to make rules...

Permanent Daylight Saving Time Hits the Federal Wall

Every autumn, the same civic ritual returns: questions about when we “fall back,” why we still do this, and why it feels like we have collectively agreed to stop, only to somehow keep doing it. What is different now is that a growing number of states have already done the obvious political part....

ICE Shooting in Austin Pulls DoorDash Into a Bigger Immigration Fight

You can almost watch the internet misfile this story in real time. A man is shot during a federal immigration enforcement operation in North Austin. Within hours, the incident is being argued as a referendum on gig-economy hiring, identity fraud, border policy, and whether immigration agents have...

What Is ActBlue and Can Foreign Money Flow Into U.S. Campaign Donations?

ActBlue is not a political action committee in the way most people use that term. It is a fundraising platform, a piece of infrastructure that makes it easy for individuals to give money online to Democratic candidates, party committees, and progressive organizations. And because money in politics...

Congress’s ‘Get Rich’ Loophole: Earmarks, Ethics Rules, and Self-Dealing

Congress has always had a strange superpower: it can write a law that moves public money, then live in the world that money reshapes. That is not automatically corrupt. It is also not automatically clean. When today’s headlines talk about a congressional “get rich” loophole, they are usually...

Can the White House Ban News Outlets?

The headline claim that a president has “banned” specific outlets from the White House hits a nerve because it sounds like censorship. But the constitutional question is narrower and more technical: not whether the government can silence a newsroom, but whether the executive branch can deny...