Articles by Eleanor Stratton

Can a Member of Congress Be Prosecuted? Legislative Immunity Explained

Members of Congress write laws. They investigate. They hold hearings that can damage reputations. They give speeches that ignite national arguments. So it is natural to assume they are insulated from ordinary criminal prosecution. The Constitution does give them a kind of immunity. But it is...

3D-Printed Guns and the Law’s Cat-and-Mouse Problem

There is a familiar American rhythm to new technology. It expands individual power. Government tries to fence it in. People immediately look for the gaps in the fence. 3D-printed guns are living inside that rhythm right now. States are experimenting with a new idea: do not just punish illegal...

Judge Denies Minnesota Bid to Keep ICE Agent Christian Castro Jailed in Texas

Minnesota asked a federal court to step in during an extradition standoff with Texas. In an emergency request, Minnesota asked a federal judge to stop Cameron County, Texas, from releasing ICE agent Christian Castro from jail while Texas decides whether to send him to Minnesota to face felony...

Warnock’s 3-step power plan and the constitutional choke points

Sen. Raphael Warnock has sketched a three-step playbook for what Democrats should do if they claw back congressional power: investigate Southern redistricting , add new states , and push a constitutional amendment that guarantees the right to vote . It is an ambitious sequence, and it is also a...

Georgia Redistricting Case Revived: What the Appeals Court Ruling Means

Redistricting lawsuits can feel abstract until you translate them into the question underneath them: who gets a fair chance to elect representatives, and under what rules ? On August 23, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit sent key parts of Georgia’s 2021 redistricting...

Supreme Court Mail-In Voting Ruling Explained: What Changes Now

Mail-in voting sounds like a simple administrative choice. Put a ballot in an envelope, mail it, count it. But when the Supreme Court issues an emergency order and a state signals more litigation, you are no longer talking about envelopes. You are talking about who gets to write the rules of...

Can Sex Offenders Run for School Board? What California Law Allows

Proposals to tighten who may hold public office tend to generate loud reactions, especially when they involve schools. One version that regularly returns to state capitols, including in California, raises a blunt civic question: can a registered sex offender legally run for school board or other...

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...