Articles by Eleanor Stratton

CPAC Texas and the Fight Over America’s Next Chapter

CPAC has always been part pep rally, part power audit. But in Texas this week, the mood felt less like a routine gathering of conservative celebrities and more like a political war room with stadium lighting. The message from the stage and the crowd was consistent: this is not just another election...

A Republican Plan to Make Colleges Pay for Student Debt Relief

Student loan politics usually arrives in one of two costumes. Either it is a moral crusade for “forgiveness,” or it is a scolding lecture about personal responsibility. Both scripts are familiar. Neither one starts where serious policy should start: who is being asked to pay, and what...

SAVE America Act Hits the Senate Wall

The Senate can talk about election rules for days and still not be any closer to changing them. That is the reality check now facing Republicans and the SAVE America Act, a bill that would require proof of citizenship to vote. It has become a kind of legislative security blanket, a campaign-ready...

Trump Administration Waives Summer Gasoline Rules as Fuel Prices Spike

When gas prices jump fast, the federal government has a familiar temptation: loosen the rules that shape what can be sold at the pump. That is exactly what the Trump administration is doing now, temporarily waiving seasonal gasoline regulations in response to sharply higher fuel costs tied to the...

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Separation of Powers: The Three Branches Explained

Most Americans can name the three branches of government. Fewer can explain what each one actually does without slipping into civics class shorthand like “Congress makes laws” and “the President enforces them.” That shorthand is not wrong. It is just incomplete. The Constitution does not...

The Bill of Rights Explained (All 10 Amendments)

The Bill of Rights is the Constitution’s first ten amendments. Think of them as America’s original set of limits on federal power: rules the government must follow even when it has good intentions, even when the public is afraid, and even when the majority would rather not. They were written to...

The Electoral College Explained

The Electoral College is the system the United States uses to elect a president and vice president. It is not a separate election that happens instead of the popular vote. It is the mechanism that turns state popular votes into the official votes that legally choose the president. Every four years,...

Jury Nullification: Can a Jury Legally Ignore the Law?

Every criminal trial ends with the same ritual: the judge explains the law, the jury “finds the facts,” and everyone pretends those roles never overlap. Then a jury walks into the deliberation room and does something the system is built to discourage, but cannot completely prevent: it refuses...

U.S. Citizenship Test: 100 Civics Questions and Answers (2026)

You can learn the U.S. Constitution in a lifetime. You can pass the civics test in a few focused weeks. The citizenship civics test is not designed to trick you. It is designed to check whether you can recognize the basic structure of American government, name a few core rights, and place key...

Habeas Corpus Explained

Habeas corpus is one of those constitutional phrases people recognize without quite knowing what it does. It sounds ceremonial, like something you would find engraved on a courtroom wall. In reality, it is a blunt tool. A person is locked up. A judge demands an answer. The government must either...

The Supreme Court and the Postmark Problem

“Election Day” sounds like a single, fixed moment. Polls close, the votes are counted, a winner emerges, and the country moves on. But the legal fight now in front of the Supreme Court turns on a deceptively simple question: when federal law sets a single national Election Day, what counts as...

Texas Democrat Talarico Scrambles After Anti-Meat Clip Returns

In politics, nothing is ever really “old.” It is just waiting to be reintroduced with a sharper caption and a meaner algorithm. That is the predicament now facing James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas, after a 2022 clip resurfaced showing him urging Texans to cut back...

The Voter ID Trap in the Senate

Washington has a favorite magic trick: declare agreement in principle, then make sure the principle never becomes law. That is the story a Republican senator tried to force into the open this week when he asked the Senate to pass a standalone national voter ID requirement by unanimous consent. The...

Justice Alito’s One-Word Argument in the Late-Ballot Case

Sometimes a Supreme Court argument turns on a constitutional principle so grand it feels like it belongs on marble. Other times it turns on a word so ordinary you could miss the stakes entirely. This week, the justices wrestled with one of those ordinary words: day . Not “liberty.” Not “equal...

DHS Shutdown Fight Turns Into a Constitutional Power Struggle

A shutdown is usually sold as a budget problem. But the longer it drags on, the more it becomes something else: a live-fire test of who, exactly, controls the machinery of the federal government. As the Department of Homeland Security entered its 36th day of a partial government shutdown affecting...

DOJ Asks Court to Lift Abrego Garcia Deportation Block

Immigration fights usually look like policy arguments. This one is mostly a procedural collision between two kinds of government power: the executive branch’s authority to remove a noncitizen, and a federal court’s authority to pause that removal while legal questions are sorted out. In the...

GOP States Rally Behind the SAVE Act

There is a quiet constitutional irony at the center of America’s loudest election fights: the federal government sets baseline rules for federal elections, but the states build the machinery that decides how those rules are enforced.  That tension is exactly what Republican governors and...

Judge Declines Recusal in Minnesota DHS, ICE Dispute

A basic promise sits underneath every court ruling, especially the ones that land in a political spotlight: the judge has to be more than fair. The judge has to look fair. That is why a new fight in federal court in Minnesota is not just about immigration enforcement tactics. It is also about...

Federal Judge Blocks Ten Commandments Displays in Arkansas Classrooms

A federal judge has permanently barred several Arkansas school districts from posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms, ruling that the state’s 2025 mandate violated the Constitution. The decision is the latest flashpoint in a long-running fight over the First Amendment’s religion clauses,...