Articles by Eleanor Stratton

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...

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...

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...

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:...

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...

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...

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...