Articles by James Caldwell

When Schools Keep Parents in the Dark

A public school is not a family. It is not a church. It is not a private club with its own secret rules. It is an arm of the state, funded by taxpayers, entrusted with children, and bound by law. Which raises a question that sounds almost impolite in 2026 but should be routine in a constitutional...

The Pledge and the Price of Dissent

Every school has its rituals. The morning announcements. The bell schedule. The routines that promise order in a building full of young, unpredictable human beings. And then there is the Pledge of Allegiance, a daily ceremony that sits at a uniquely American tension point: part civic tradition,...

The Supreme Court Just Rewrote the Rules for Therapy Bans

Colorado tried to do what many states have done over the last decade: use professional licensing law to block licensed counselors from performing so-called “conversion therapy” on minors. On March 31, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court said Colorado went too far, at least under the legal test the...

A Supreme Court Test for Gun-Industry Immunity

Congress does not pass many laws that announce their purpose as plainly as the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005. Supporters of the law have long described the idea in straightforward terms: if a firearm is made and sold legally, and then later misused by a criminal, the...

Arrested by an Algorithm

A warrant is supposed to be the Constitution’s way of forcing the government to slow down, look closely, and justify itself. It is the point where suspicion has to harden into something more than a hunch. So what happens when a warrant is influenced by a machine’s “maybe,” and that maybe...

ICE at the Airport: Emergency Patch or New Normal?

Airports are one of the few public spaces where Americans already accept a heavy federal footprint as the price of safety. Metal detectors, ID checks, pat downs, no liquids, no jokes about bombs. We have lived inside that bargain for a generation. Now comes a new question, sharpened by a government...

Washington, D.C. is not just the seat of the federal government. It is where federal power gets questioned in public, under oath, and on a timetable that can move far slower than politics. Right now, that timetable is colliding with major parts of President Trump’s second-term agenda. In case...

Every generation gets its own version of the same civic argument: Where does a constitutional right end, and where does the government’s power to manage public spaces begin? This month, that argument moved into a particularly ordinary place with an unusually sharp legal edge, the neighborhood...

Judge Orders Attorney Access at Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’

A federal judge has issued a pointed reminder to Florida’s Everglades immigration detention facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz”: detention does not come with a pause button for lawyer access. U.S. District Judge Sheri Polster Chappell has entered a preliminary injunction requiring the...

Fentanyl, Money, and National Security

When a drug kills this many Americans, it stops being just a “crime problem.” It becomes something closer to a sovereignty test. That is the argument South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson is forcing the country to face: fentanyl is not only a public health catastrophe, it is a national...

Van Hollen and the Shutdown Question: What Did Democrats Win?

There is a special kind of political argument that only happens during a shutdown. It is partly about funding, but it is also about blame. And if you listen closely, it is also about the Constitution’s basic design: Congress holds the purse strings, the executive branch runs the agencies, and the...

Wars have a way of producing two very different kinds of numbers: the numbers leaders say out loud, and the numbers intelligence officers say behind closed doors. When those sets of numbers clash, the Constitution is not just background reading. It is the measuring stick. After roughly a month of...

When Congress toys with a government shutdown, plenty of people say it is about principle. But a harder question keeps coming up: is this a moral stand, or a bargaining chip? That question surfaced again on Friday, when House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was asked by an interviewer whether a...

Iranian ‘Sleeper’ Agents in Canada

When most Americans hear the phrase sleeper agent , they picture a spy novel: a quiet figure living an ordinary life, waiting for a coded message that flips a switch. But the constitutional question raised by a recent allegation is not cinematic. It is practical and unsettling. A claim attributed...

A Dutch Courtroom and a Genocide Claim

An Amsterdam courtroom is not where most Americans go to think about constitutional government. But it should be. Because when a lawyer stands before judges and calls COVID-19 vaccination “the largest genocide of the world’s population ever,” he is not just filing a brief. He is throwing a...

A Murder Case and Due Process

Every so often, a criminal case lands in the public square with a set of details so jarring that it disrupts our civic instincts. A man is accused of murdering a Chicago student. He is reportedly in the country illegally. And then comes the detail that makes people sit up straight: according to...

Former Frontex Chief Under French Probe Over Migrant Pushbacks

When governments enforce borders, somebody always wants a courtroom to be the final word. France has reportedly opened a judicial investigation targeting Fabrice Leggeri, the former head of the European Union border agency Frontex and a current Member of the European Parliament. The allegation is...

House GOP Passes DHS Patch as Shutdown Drags Toward a Record

Washington has reached that familiar point where procedure starts to look like punishment. Late Friday, House Republicans approved a short-term funding extension for the Department of Homeland Security, a move meant to break a standoff that has already stretched into a 42-day partial shutdown. The...

DHS Funding Standoff

Washington loves to talk about “national security” in the abstract. But the Department of Homeland Security shutdown has a way of stripping the abstraction off. When the White House has to reach for existing funds to keep about 50,000 TSA agents from missing yet another paycheck, you are not...

Iran Hits Prince Sultan Air Base: The Constitutional Question Behind the Smoke

Twelve American service members were injured on Friday when Iran hit Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia with a combined missile and drone strike. Two of those troops were reported seriously hurt. U.S. officials said at least two KC-135 aerial refueling aircraft also suffered significant damage....