The U.S. Constitution

Amicus Briefs: When Outside Groups Weigh In

You have probably seen the headline version of this: a major case hits the Supreme Court and suddenly a flood of outside groups “weigh in.” States. Trade associations. Civil rights organizations. Retired judges. Sometimes even members of Congress. Those filings are usually amicus briefs , short...

Mistrials and Hung Juries

A criminal trial is supposed to end with a verdict. Guilty or not guilty. A clean, final answer. But sometimes the system cannot get there. Jurors cannot agree. Something happens in the courtroom that makes a fair verdict impossible. The judge declares a mistrial , and the case hits an unsettling...

The Senate Blue Slip, Explained

Some of the most consequential power in Washington lives in places you will not find in the Constitution’s text. The Senate “blue slip” is one of those places. It is not a law. It is not a constitutional requirement. It is a Senate Judiciary Committee tradition that can slow, reshape, or stop...

Unanimous Consent in the Senate

The Senate has 100 members, debate can be extended on many questions, and it has a reputation for procedural gridlock in practice. Yet most days, it still manages to move quickly through stacks of routine work. The tool that makes that possible is unanimous consent , usually shortened to UC . UC is...

What Is a Special Counsel?

Americans tend to talk about “the DOJ” as if it is a single, unified person with one set of motives. In reality, it is a sprawling bureaucracy with thousands of attorneys, layered supervision, and a basic institutional goal: to make prosecutorial decisions that can survive scrutiny from bosses,...

Senatorial Holds Explained

The Senate is built partly around a polite fiction: that it runs on cooperation. Most days, it does. Many noncontroversial measures move by unanimous consent, many nominations get cleared in batches, and the chamber can move faster than its reputation suggests. Then one senator decides to slow...

Court Gag Orders Explained

A gag order is one of the stranger things an American court can do in public: tell people involved in a case to stop talking about it. It sounds like censorship, and sometimes it functions that way. But it is also a courtroom management tool, aimed at protecting a defendant’s right to a fair...

Criminal Indictment vs Information vs Charge

You can be told you are “charged with a crime” in several different ways, by different actors, at different moments in a case. That is why the words indictment , information , complaint , and “ charge ” get used interchangeably in headlines, even though they do not mean the same thing. A...

Congressional Subpoenas Explained

A congressional subpoena is one of the sharpest tools Congress has for getting information it believes it needs to legislate, oversee the executive branch, or investigate public problems. It can look like a court subpoena. It can feel like a criminal investigation. But constitutionally and...

The Speech and Debate Clause

Members of Congress say controversial things for a living. Sometimes they say them in hearings, sometimes on the House floor, sometimes in a committee report that lands hard in the news cycle. So here is the natural question, especially when subpoenas start flying and prosecutors start asking...

Contempt of Court Explained

“Contempt of court” sounds like a judge punishing someone for being rude. Sometimes it is about behavior. Often, it is about enforcement: the court’s ability to make its orders mean something in the real world. And before we go further, a quick but important separation. Contempt of court is a...

Congressional Censure Explained

Congress can do something that feels like punishment without ever touching a person’s job title: it can formally condemn a member in the name of the institution itself. That is censure. It is not a criminal sentence. It is not impeachment. It is not, strictly speaking, a removal tool. It is...

When Schools Keep Parents in the Dark

A public school is not a family. It is not a church. It is not a private club with its own secret rules. It is an arm of the state, funded by taxpayers, entrusted with children, and bound by law. Which raises a question that sounds almost impolite in 2026 but should be routine in a constitutional...

The Pledge and the Price of Dissent

Every school has its rituals. The morning announcements. The bell schedule. The routines that promise order in a building full of young, unpredictable human beings. And then there is the Pledge of Allegiance, a daily ceremony that sits at a uniquely American tension point: part civic tradition,...

Chicago Mayor’s Armed Detail and Two Sets of Rules

There is a particular kind of argument that never happens in a courtroom and yet shapes constitutional culture anyway: the argument about who gets to live under the “real” rules. That is why a reported price tag attached to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s personal security has landed with...

When ‘Welfare Checks’ Skip Due Process

A federal jury in Texas has approved damages for a family who says two school district police officers took their 14-year-old daughter from her home after deciding, wrongly, that she had been “abandoned.” The case is not just about a bad call in a tense moment. Jurors concluded the officers...

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,...