Constitutional Topics

What Is FISA? How Confirmation Votes and Surveillance Renewal Got Linked

FISA is one of those Washington acronyms that seems designed to stay mysterious until it suddenly becomes the headline. It stands for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act , a post-Watergate and Church Committee era law that created special rules for spying in the name of national security. It...

What Is the Filibuster? Senate Rules, New States, Court Expansion, and the Save America Act

The word filibuster does not appear anywhere in the Constitution. And yet it routinely determines what the United States can and cannot do, not because it is a constitutional command, but because the Senate chose to build a supermajority gate into its own procedures. That is why a single newsy...

What Is FISA Section 702?

When surveillance makes the news, the public question is almost always the same: Can the government spy without a warrant? FISA Section 702 sits right on that nerve. It is a federal surveillance authority designed for foreign intelligence gathering, built for the reality that modern communications...

Court Packing and the Separation of Powers

A sitting U.S. senator just addressed, in plain terms, a topic that can turn politically volatile fast. Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, asked on Meet the Press about expanding the Supreme Court, replied that all options have to be on the table . That line matters because court expansion is not...

Can a President Suspend Habeas Corpus?

Habeas corpus sounds like Latin you can safely ignore until the day it becomes your problem. In plain English, it is the right to ask a judge a simple question: Why is the government holding this person? If the government cannot justify the detention under law, the court can order release or other...

Patagonia vs. Pattie Gonia: When Trademark Law Meets Parody

There is a familiar American story hiding inside a very modern fight: a famous brand says it has to police its name, and an activist says their work depends on being recognizable. On Jan. 21, 2026 , Patagonia filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against environmental activist and drag performer...

Techdirt’s Funniest Comments of the Week, and Why They Matter

There is a particular kind of comment section that does not just dunk on the news. It audits it. Techdirt tends to draw that kind of reader. People who can spot a bad incentive structure from a mile away, people who understand that “just ban it” is not an argument, and people who use humor the...

Mail and Wire Fraud Explained

Mail fraud and wire fraud are the federal government’s legal Swiss Army knife for deception that crosses a mailbox or an internet connection. They show up in investment scams, fake invoices, corrupt contracting, bogus charities, identity theft rings, and corporate coverups. The reason is simple:...

Obstruction of Justice, Explained

In the movies, obstruction of justice usually looks like a panicked cover-up. A shredded file. A hush-money exchange. A witness who suddenly “can’t remember.” In federal court, it is less cinematic and more structural. Obstruction is not a single crime. It is a family of statutes that punish...

Federal Conspiracy Charges Explained

Federal conspiracy is one of those charges that sounds like it belongs in spy movies, but it shows up in everyday indictments: fraud, drugs, public corruption, immigration, protest cases, even market manipulation. It is also one of the government’s most flexible tools, because it lets prosecutors...

Monell Liability Explained

You can sue a police officer for violating the Constitution. That part is familiar. Suing the city is where people get blindsided. Most of us assume the government “owns” what its employees do. In everyday life, employers are often responsible for employees under a doctrine called respondeat...

SpeechNow.org v. FEC Explained

Super PACs did not appear out of nowhere in 2010. They grew out of a specific legal conclusion: if a group is making independent expenditures , meaning it is not coordinating its spending with a candidate, then limiting how much people can give to that group starts to look less like corruption...

You can legally buy an entire season of courtside tickets and no one calls it speech. But give money to politics and the Supreme Court treats it as a First Amendment problem. McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (2014) is a major campaign finance case, not because it invented a new right, but...

Midterm elections are a product of the Constitution’s staggered election cycles: the United States does not hand one election a four-year blank check. The House of Representatives turns over every two years. The Senate turns over in thirds. Put together, midterms force the national government to...

You can tell a lot about a democracy by what it counts and what it ignores. After each federal census, Tennessee had fresh population numbers in hand, then largely ignored what the new figures meant for representation. District lines for the state legislature had not been meaningfully updated since...

Fusion Voting Explained

Most American ballots force a simple story: you pick a candidate, and that choice also picks a party. Fusion voting scrambles that script. It lets multiple parties nominate the same candidate so that candidate appears on more than one party line on the ballot. Voters can support the candidate and...

IEEPA Explained: Presidential Emergency Economic Powers

When Americans hear the words national emergency , they tend to picture troops, disaster zones, and urgent speeches. But a huge share of modern emergency power is quieter and more technical. It runs through banks, shipping insurers, payment rails, export licenses, and corporate compliance...

Criminal Discovery in Federal Cases Explained

In a federal criminal case, “discovery” sounds like it should mean the same thing it means in civil court: broad, document-heavy exchange where each side can demand information from the other and take depositions to lock in testimony. That is not how criminal discovery works. Federal criminal...

Shaw v. Reno Explained

Most redistricting controversies feel like inside baseball until you see the shape of a district that looks like it was poured through a crack in the map. That was the visual spark behind Shaw v. Reno (1993). The case did not say legislatures must ignore race. It said something narrower and more...

McCulloch v. Maryland Explained

There are Supreme Court decisions that resolve a dispute. And then there are decisions that shape what kind of country the United States can become under the Constitution. McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) is the second kind. On the surface, it was a fight over a bank and a state tax. Underneath, it was...