News

Pentagon Escorts and the First Amendment

The First Amendment does not promise journalists a reserved seat inside every government building. But it also does not allow the government to hand out access like a reward and take it away like a punishment. That tension is now playing out in one of the most symbolically loaded workplaces in...

Birthright Citizenship After the Court Says No

You can almost hear the constitutional gears grinding when a president loses at the Supreme Court and immediately turns to Congress for a do-over. That is exactly what happened after the Court rejected President Trump’s January 2025 executive order that attempted to condition U.S.-birth citizenship...

The FTC Firing Case and the End of “Independent” Commissions

The Supreme Court just answered a question that has hovered over Washington for nearly a century: when Congress creates an “independent” regulatory commission, can it still force the President to keep commissioners he does not want? In Trump v. Slaughter , the Court said no. By a 6-3 vote, the...

Supreme Court: Geofence Warrants Are Fourth Amendment Searches

For years, police have increasingly relied on a powerful shortcut: instead of starting with a suspect, they start with a place and time, then ask a tech company for a list of phones that were there. On Monday, the Supreme Court put a constitutional label on that practice. By a 6-3 vote, the Court...

Supreme Court Lets States Keep Trans Athlete Bans in School Sports

The Supreme Court closed out June with a decision that will reverberate through school athletics. In a 6–3 ruling covering two cases, the Court allowed Idaho and West Virginia to enforce laws that bar transgender girls from competing on girls’ school sports teams. The cases were Little v. Hecox and...

Late Mail Ballots, Mississippi, and the SAVE Act: What Courts Allowed and Why

Mississippi’s rule sounds simple: if a mailed absentee ballot is postmarked by Election Day , it can still be counted even if it arrives afterward , so long as it arrives by the state’s deadline. That kind of rule has become a recurring constitutional flashpoint because it forces two questions that...

Springfield’s Haitian Neighbors and the Fragile Promise of Legal Belonging

Springfield, Ohio has become a kind of national looking glass. Not because it asked to be, and not because the people building lives there are doing anything remarkable in the headline sense. It is a looking glass because a Supreme Court ruling just turned a legal category into a trapdoor. When the...

Hawaii’s ‘Vampire Rule’ and the Trouble With Black Code History

When the Supreme Court tells lower courts to look to “history and tradition,” it can sound simple. Find old laws, compare them to modern ones, and see what lines up. But the Court’s recent decision in Wolford v. Lopez shows how messy that exercise can get when a state’s best historical hook comes...

Court Packing and the Separation of Powers

When Americans argue about the Supreme Court, they usually argue about outcomes: who won, who lost, and what the justices “did to” one side or the other. But lately the argument has shifted. Not what the Court decided, but what the Court should be . After a string of high-profile Trump-era...

Springfield’s Haitian Community Faces TPS Shock With Unity

You can live for years inside a legal category and still wake up one morning to discover it was never a wall. It was a curtain. That is the quiet terror Temporary Protected Status has always carried: it is protection, but not permanence. It is lawful presence, but not belonging in the way most...

Springfield’s Haitian Community Faces TPS Shock, Finds Strength in Each Other

There are Supreme Court decisions that arrive like weather. You see the clouds gathering, you hear the distant thunder of oral argument, you brace for impact, and then the storm still manages to flatten the house. That is what it felt like in Springfield, Ohio, after the Court ruled Mullin v. Doe...

Supreme Court Opens the Door to Ending TPS for 1.3 Million People

Temporary Protected Status, usually called TPS, is one of those immigration programs that can sound technical until you realize what it does in everyday terms. It lets people already in the United States remain here and work legally when their home country is too dangerous for safe return, often...

The Supreme Court’s Asylum Ruling and the Executive Power Shift

Immigration law is full of gray areas. Not moral gray areas. Jurisdictional ones. Who decides whether a person has actually “entered” the United States? Who gets to decide which immigrants keep a lawful foothold after years inside the country? And perhaps most consequentially, when agencies make...

Birthright Citizenship and the 14th Amendment

Most constitutional fights are about the meaning of a power. This one is about the meaning of a word. Birthright citizenship lives in a single sentence of the 14th Amendment. For more than a century, Americans have treated that sentence as a bright line: if you are born here, you are one of us. Now...

Wolford v. Lopez Explained: Where It Stands

Wolford v. Lopez is a closely watched post- Bruen challenge to Hawaii’s new public-carry regime. But it is important to be clear about what it is and what it is not: it is a lower-court case in the Ninth Circuit, and the Supreme Court has not issued a merits decision in Wolford . Even without a...

Supreme Court Lets Exxon Sue Cuba Over 1960 Seizures

The Supreme Court has given Exxon Mobil a green light to continue a lawsuit against state-owned oil companies in Cuba, tied to property the Cuban government took in 1960 after Fidel Castro’s revolution. It is a striking reminder that, in the United States, events that happened generations ago can...

Judge Blocks Citizenship Database Checks for Voter Rolls

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from using a streamlined method to check citizenship status through a federal database as part of voter eligibility efforts. The dispute centers on a long-running tension in election administration: how to keep voter rolls accurate...

SCOTUS: Marijuana Use Alone Can’t Void the Second Amendment

For decades, the American legal system has treated “drugs” as a kind of constitutional solvent. Invoke them, and suddenly ordinary rules soften. Searches get easier. Property gets taken. Sentences get longer. Rights get treated less like rights and more like privileges granted to the well behaved....

Supreme Court Cert Denial in Police Stop Case: What the Fourth Amendment Says

The Supreme Court declined to take up a case that presents a question many Americans assume has a simple answer. If a police officer’s actions during a stop are allegedly driven by a person’s race, does that turn the encounter into an unconstitutional seizure? That question was presented in Weaver...

Trump’s Truth Social Polls

Over a Saturday morning on Truth Social, Trump posted two surveys for his followers: one workshopping a derogatory nickname for Democrats, and another floating a rebrand of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On the surface, it is politics-as-entertainment. Underneath, it is also a live...