Articles by Eleanor Stratton

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...

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...

What Is a Lame Duck President (or Congress)?

A lame duck is an elected official who is still in office, but is on the way out. They either lost reelection, chose not to run again, or are term-limited, and everyone in Washington knows their time is expiring. The phrase sounds like a joke, but the situation is real power plus declining...

How Small Claims Court Works

Small claims court is the legal system’s fast lane: less formal, cheaper to file, and built for ordinary people who need a judge to settle a money dispute without turning it into a full-blown lawsuit. But “simple” does not mean “automatic.” The court does not investigate your story. The...

Expungement and Sealing: Clearing a Criminal Record

A criminal record can follow you like a shadow file. You served the sentence, paid the fines, finished probation, and still get treated like the case is happening right now. Job applications ask about convictions. Landlords run checks. Licensing boards pull reports. Even when you have turned your...

How Does a Recall Election Work?

Recall elections feel like a constitutional pressure valve. A public official wins office in November, and then the public decides it cannot wait until the next November to revisit that choice. But recall is not a federal constitutional feature. It is a state-created tool, governed primarily by...

How Bail Works in the United States

Bail is supposed to answer a deceptively simple question: while a criminal case is pending, does the government have to keep you in jail to make sure you show up to court and keep the community safe? Most people think bail is the price of freedom. Legally, it is closer to a promise backed by money...

Budget Reconciliation Explained

In the Senate, most big fights eventually run into the same math problem: 60 votes. That is the practical threshold for ending debate on most contested legislation because of the filibuster and the cloture vote used to end debate. Budget reconciliation is the workaround Congress created for certain...

What Is a Plea Bargain and How Does It Work?

You have a constitutional right to a trial. Everyone knows that. Except most criminal cases never reach one. They end with a deal, negotiated in conference rooms and courthouse hallways, then entered on the record in a short court hearing. That deal is a plea bargain , and it is not a side feature...

The Hatch Act: What It Is and Who It Applies To

The Hatch Act is the federal government’s attempt to answer a deceptively simple question: How do you run a democracy when the people who administer the government also have political opinions, political friends, and political ambitions? Congress’s answer, first enacted in 1939, was not “ban...

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)

There is no “Right to Know” Amendment. No sentence in the Constitution that promises citizens a window into the files of the federal government. That said, American law does recognize limited access rights in certain settings, and many states have their own “right to know” language in...

Cloture: How the Senate Ends a Filibuster

In the Senate, debate is not just talk. It is leverage. A determined minority can slow a bill down, tie it up, and sometimes quietly kill it without ever mustering the votes to defeat it outright. That maneuver is what most people mean when they say filibuster , even though modern filibusters often...

House GOP Pushes New DHS Funding Plan as Shutdown Drags On

A government shutdown is often described like a weather event, something that simply arrives and then passes. But constitutionally, it is not weather. It is a choice. And this week, the choice hardened into a familiar shape: the House and Senate moving in opposite directions, each insisting the...

Pro-Hamas Grads and the Civics Vacuum

In some campus settings, you can imagine a familiar scene even without a headline attached. A commencement ceremony tends to follow its set rhythms: speeches about gratitude, gowns that never fit quite right, and a symbolic handoff from student to citizen. In some disputes, an additional layer...

No Kings Protests and the Celebrity Megaphone

Americans do not need celebrities to tell them what a monarchy is. We wrote our national origin story by rejecting one. But when famous voices show up at mass rallies, they do something the Constitution cannot do by itself. They make a civics argument loud enough to compete with everything else in...

Pam Bondi, Citizenship, and the Constitution

Pam Bondi recently argued that “Being a citizen in our country is a privilege. It’s not a right.” She made the remark while discussing denaturalization, the legal process for taking citizenship away from someone who became an American through naturalization. That sentence sounds like a...