Outside the Beltway

The trend toward hard-right parties continues.

I know it when I see it.

How far should the government be able to go?

The former president faces multiple criminal prosecutions.

The New York Times looks into ties between a DC area law school and the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority is signaling an unfavorable ruling.

A silly workaround to an infuriating problem that won’t go away.

More on primaries with a foray into Madison and the general politics of power-seekers and incentives.

Our system lacks accountability.

The head of the House investigatory committee seems to think so.

President Trump’s destruction of longstanding norms continues under his successor.

The post really isn’t about Sinema as much as it about a theory of poltiics.

Why isn’t Joe Biden President already?

Gridlock doesn’t mean government stops. It just shifts who is governing.

Definitions are fun, right?

A fundamental building block of our system makes it nearly impossible to fix.

The platform decision is emblematic of a Trump-led party.

A mixed ruling: New York wins, Congress loses–but no release before the election.

A 7-2 decision by the highest court in the land is less decisive than the numbers suggest.

Is being ruled by the elderly a bad thing?

On presidents

Has this precedent permanently damaged the country? Or is it just politics as usual?

To defang impeachment is an invitation for presidents to ignore the rule of law.

Alliance to party trumps alliance to branch.

Two Federal Courts have blocked the Administration from diverting Defense Department funds to pay for the President’s border wall

The House Intelligence Committee has released its report resulting from its investigation of the Ukraine scandal.

A Federal Judge in Washington, D.C. has ruled against the Trump Administration’s latest effort to stonewall Congressional inquiries.

Rich Lowry puts preferred outcomes over constitutional process.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals dealt President Trump another setback in his effort to keep his financial records out of Congressional hands.

A Federal Court has struck down the President’s diversion of funds for his border wall.

When the facts make for a poor defense, attack the process.

A wrongheaded solution for a legitimate problem.

In the US, the candidate defines the party, not the other way around.

Embattled Governor Ricardo A. Rosselló has stepped down but succession issues surround the man who took the oath of office late yesterday.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg isn’t very impressed by the proposals made by several liberal politicians lately to increase the size of the Supreme Court to counterbalance the conservative tilt created by the Gorsuch and Kavanaugh confirmations.

The Supreme Court handed the President a victory last night, ruling that the Plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging his funding of the border wall did not have standing to challenge his diversion of Defense Department funds. This may only be a temporary victory, though.

Just over nine years after retiring from the Supreme Court, former Associate Justice John Paul Stevens has passed away at the age of 99.

A federal appeals court has ruled that DC and Maryland officials have no right to bring the suit.

Another court loss for Trump and his border wall.

A law professor reads too much into a cryptic concurrence.

The Republican Party is ruining the country. But so are the Democrats?

The President is once again claiming Executive Privilege to prevent Congress from getting access to certain documents.

A Federal Judge in Washington, D.C. dismissed a lawsuit against Trump “national emergency” to fund the border wall, but his ruling did not reach the merits of the lawsuit’s claim.

A Federal Judge has put at least a partial hold on President’s Trump’s effort to use a “national emergency” to fund his border wall.

A longstanding legal question may finally come to a head.

In an effort to block the release of the full report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Trump Administration is invoking Executive Privilege.

More Madisonian musing on the current state of our constitutional order.

Back to Fed 51 and this moment in oversight: we have to remember what ambitions drive politicians.

As I have noted before: party trumps institutional pride. The Barr testimony is just another example.

President Trump claims that he’d challenge any effort to impeach him in court, but the law makes clear that he can’t.