The U.S. Constitution

Springfield’s Haitian Neighbors and the Fragile Promise of Legal Belonging

Springfield, Ohio has become a kind of national looking glass. Not because it asked to be, and not because the people building lives there are doing anything remarkable in the headline sense. It is a looking glass because a Supreme Court ruling just turned a legal category into a trapdoor. When the...

Hawaii’s ‘Vampire Rule’ and the Trouble With Black Code History

When the Supreme Court tells lower courts to look to “history and tradition,” it can sound simple. Find old laws, compare them to modern ones, and see what lines up. But the Court’s recent decision in Wolford v. Lopez shows how messy that exercise can get when a state’s best historical hook...

Court Packing and the Separation of Powers

When Americans argue about the Supreme Court, they usually argue about outcomes: who won, who lost, and what the justices “did to” one side or the other. But lately the argument has shifted. Not what the Court decided, but what the Court should be . After a string of high-profile Trump-era...

Springfield’s Haitian Community Faces TPS Shock With Unity

You can live for years inside a legal category and still wake up one morning to discover it was never a wall. It was a curtain. That is the quiet terror Temporary Protected Status has always carried: it is protection, but not permanence. It is lawful presence, but not belonging in the way most...

Springfield’s Haitian Community Faces TPS Shock, Finds Strength in Each Other

There are Supreme Court decisions that arrive like weather. You see the clouds gathering, you hear the distant thunder of oral argument, you brace for impact, and then the storm still manages to flatten the house. That is what it felt like in Springfield, Ohio, after the Court ruled Mullin v. Doe...

Minnesota Fraud Probes and House Oversight: What Congress Can Actually Do

When a state is accused of mishandling public benefits money, the first instinct is to ask a simple question: isn’t that a state problem? It can be. But it can become a federal one quickly when the program at issue is powered by federal dollars. That is the constitutional hinge behind renewed...

Immigration and Housing Costs: What the Fed Paper Actually Says

People are sharing a headline-friendly takeaway from a recent Federal Reserve working paper: that an increase in unauthorized immigration in the period it studies is estimated , under the paper’s model, to have raised home prices by about 2.2% and rents by about 1.4% . The key point, though, is...

Can a President Block a D.C. Mayor’s Agenda?

When a president promises to stop a Washington, D.C. mayor from implementing policies on policing, bail, or cooperation with ICE, the instinctive question is simple: can he actually do that? The constitutional answer is both more powerful and more limited than it sounds. D.C. is not a state. It is...

Supreme Court Opens the Door to Ending TPS for 1.3 Million People

Temporary Protected Status, usually called TPS, is one of those immigration programs that can sound technical until you realize what it does in everyday terms. It lets people already in the United States remain here and work legally when their home country is too dangerous for safe return, often...

The Supreme Court’s Asylum Ruling and the Executive Power Shift

Immigration law is full of gray areas. Not moral gray areas. Jurisdictional ones. Who decides whether a person has actually “entered” the United States? Who gets to decide which immigrants keep a lawful foothold after years inside the country? And perhaps most consequentially, when agencies...

Birthright Citizenship and the 14th Amendment

Most constitutional fights are about the meaning of a power. This one is about the meaning of a word. Birthright citizenship lives in a single sentence of the 14th Amendment. For more than a century, Americans have treated that sentence as a bright line: if you are born here, you are one of us. Now...

Same Names on the Ballot: What the Law Actually Requires

Voters sometimes assume that if two candidates share a name, one of them must be barred from the ballot. In practice, election law often takes the opposite approach. Many states try to reduce confusion through ballot formatting and disclosure , not by limiting who may run. This matters in Alaska...

Can Congress Break Up Apple? Antitrust Power and the Constitution

When a member of Congress says a company like Apple is “far too big” and floats a breakup as prices rise, it hits a nerve for a simple reason: people can feel market power. But the constitutional question is more precise than the political one. Can Congress break up Apple? Congress can create...

Supreme Court Immigration Rulings Explained: Border Power and the Constitution

When the Supreme Court issues an immigration decision, the headlines tend to collapse everything into one question: Who is in charge of the border? The White House, Congress, the courts, or the states. That is the right question, but it has three different answers depending on what you mean by...

Court-Packing After the Haiti TPS Ruling

When people hear “separation of powers,” they often picture three branches neatly checking each other like a well-trained debate team. In real life, the checks are rougher. They are political. They are procedural. And sometimes, they are blunt instruments. This week, one of those blunt...

Wolford v. Lopez Explained: Where It Stands

Wolford v. Lopez is a closely watched post- Bruen challenge to Hawaii’s new public-carry regime. But it is important to be clear about what it is and what it is not: it is a lower-court case in the Ninth Circuit, and the Supreme Court has not issued a merits decision in Wolford . Even without a...

Primary Ballot Access: What Parties Can and Cannot Control

Whenever an outsider candidate wins a primary, a familiar question suddenly becomes urgent: how did they get on the ballot in the first place , and can the party change the rules to stop it from happening again? This week’s wave of commentary about insurgent primary wins and establishment...

What the SAVE Act Would Do, and Why a House Rules Fight Can Stop It

The news hook is procedural, but the stakes are substantive: House conservatives used rules votes as leverage to demand floor time for the SAVE Act . In a closely divided House, threatening to vote down the rule for unrelated legislation can stall the chamber, because most major bills cannot reach...

Temporary Protected Status: What TPS Is and What the Supreme Court Said

Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, rarely makes headlines until a designation is extended, narrowed, or ended. That is because TPS sits at a constitutional pressure point: Congress writes immigration statutes, the executive branch administers them, and the courts resolve disputes over what the...

Can Non-Citizens Vote in Federal Elections?

Every election cycle, a familiar claim resurfaces: non-citizens are voting , sometimes because a state “automatically registered” them. A recent guilty plea by a French citizen tied to the 2022 midterms, paired with an allegation that he was registered through a New Jersey motor vehicle...