Articles by Eleanor Stratton

How Impeachment Works in the House: What Al Green’s New Resolution Does

When a House member files an impeachment resolution, the headlines often make it sound like the constitutional gears have already started grinding toward removal. They have not. Rep. Al Green of Texas has filed another resolution calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump. The filing...

Can the U.S. Revoke Visas From Asylum Seekers?

Visas feel like permission slips. You have one, you show it, you enter, you stay until the date on the stamp. But U.S. immigration law treats a visa as something narrower and more fragile: a travel document that lets you seek admission at a port of entry. Once you are inside the United States, your...

USPS Mail-In Ballots and the New Federal Portal Fight

You can tell this dispute is not really about envelopes when the pressure point is not “fix your postage,” but “make your ballot mail match our data format.” Critics frame it that way, anyway. USPS frames it differently: as a modernization and visibility effort for election mail. The gap between...

Trump’s “Iran Is Completely Collapsing” Post and Bessent’s Sanctions Push, Explained

When a sitting president posts “IRAN IS COMPLETELY COLLAPSING!!!” in all caps, it reads like a dispatch from the front line. That is exactly how the internet treated it on August 24, 2026: as if the United States had just received confirmation that Iran’s government was falling in real time. But...

What the NSA Can and Cannot Do: Election Intelligence, Oversight, and the Constitution

When a memo or whistleblower story claims the National Security Agency sat on election-threat reporting, the instinctive question is personal: Who decided that, and are they allowed to do it? But the real answer is structural. The NSA lives inside a constitutional machine with three kinds of...

Can a President Impose 50% Tariffs on Canada?

The Constitution puts the power to impose tariffs in Congress , not the President. Article I gives Congress authority to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” and to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.” In the founding design, tariffs were supposed to be a legislative choice...

Can the Secretary of State Freeze Visas?

The U.S. Constitution does not mention the terms visa or immigration ban explicitly. But it does build a system where major government actions need a lawful source of power: Congress writes statutes, the executive branch administers and enforces them (including through regulations when Congress...

What Is the SAVE America Act? Senate Rules, Voter ID, and Proof of Citizenship

When a high-profile election bill seems to vanish into a Senate recess, it is tempting to treat the outcome like a mystery. Usually it is not. It is procedure. The SAVE America Act is one of those bills that pulls two different constitutional questions into the same spotlight: who sets the rules...

Airport Wudu Stations and the First Amendment: What DOJ Can Do

Debates over so called “wudu stations” in public airports can sound like culture war fodder. But the underlying issue is a straightforward constitutional question: what does the First Amendment require, and what does it forbid, when a government run space tries to accommodate religious practice?...

DOJ Subpoenas Letitia James: What It Means

You can feel the constitutional tension in a single word: subpoena . It sounds procedural, almost clerical. A document. A deadline. A signature. But a subpoena is a legal command backed by the possibility of court enforcement. It forces the recipient to produce documents or testimony under...

Can a President Waive Beef Tariffs?

You can feel the constitutional tension in a sentence like this: the United States will allow up to 300,000 metric tons of ground-beef product to be imported for 90 days with “no out of quota tariff.” That is policy language. It is also power language. But unless you can point to the implementing...

What Is ICE’s VOICE Office?

When a story about immigration enforcement goes viral, a particular acronym tends to surface alongside the anger and grief: VOICE . It sounds like a hotline. It sounds like a task force. It sounds like a promise. In reality, ICE’s VOICE office was something more specific and more bureaucratic: a...

Can Congress Subpoena Nonprofits?

When a nonprofit calls a congressional subpoena a “witch hunt,” it is invoking a very old American fear: that oversight can slide into punishment. The Constitution sits in the middle of that tension. Congress has real power to investigate and demand records. Nonprofits, in turn, can argue they have...

Crypto, the Fed, and the Master Account Question

The Constitution never says the words payment rails . It never defines a master account . And it certainly never anticipates a Wyoming-chartered bank built around digital assets asking for a key to the Federal Reserve’s payment system. But here we are, with a dispute that looks technical on the...

When ICE Arrests Meet Sanctuary: The Fourth Circuit’s Church Injunction

People talk about churches as “sanctuary” like it is a magic word. As if stepping through a chapel door flips the Constitution into a different mode where federal law pauses politely in the narthex. That is not how American law works. But a federal court order can change how law is enforced in a...

Who Controls Federal Courthouses?

Federal judges do not just decide cases. They also have to answer questions like whether a courtroom is secure enough to try a terrorism case, whether a leaky roof can wait until next term, and whether a courthouse can keep functioning when HVAC systems fail in July. That is why a flare-up between...

Can Louisiana Require the Ten Commandments in Public School Classrooms?

When a state tells public schools to hang the Ten Commandments in every classroom, it is not just a culture story. It is a constitutional stress test. The question is not whether the Ten Commandments are historically influential. They are. The question is whether the government can require a...

Why White House Construction Can Be Blocked

When headlines say “White House construction is blocked,” it sounds like a simple clash of wills: the President wants to build, a judge says stop. But constitutionally, it is almost never that clean. The White House is the President’s home and the seat of executive power. It is also federal...

Can Non-Citizens Vote in Federal Elections? DOJ Charges Explained

Every election year brings the same basic question back into the public debate: can non-citizens vote in federal elections? Sometimes the question is prompted by a specific prosecution. If you are reading this because of a headline about an alleged non-citizen voting and using someone else’s...

America Hits $40 Trillion in Debt

Forty trillion dollars is the kind of number that stops people mid-scroll. It does not sound like “policy.” It sounds like a cosmic error message. But the national debt is not a mysterious scoreboard controlled by a president, a central bank, or a cabal of accountants. It is the accumulated result...