Outside the Beltway

Once again, the Administration is walking back the President’s statements on a controversial issue.

A group of twenty states have revived an old argument to mount a new legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act.

Yet more absurdity from Brussels, where regulators seemingly don’t understand how the Internet works.

The Supreme Court is being asked to decide whether an American company can be required to turn over data stored on servers located overseas.

President Trump appeared to change positions on several gun control ideas, but he probably doesn’t mean it.

Despite the activism we’ve seen in the wake of the school shooting in Florida, it’s unlikely that we’ll see significant Congressional action on guns.

I don’t see how the state legislature making tax decisions on the basis of the public position an company takes is legal under the 14th Amendment. 

The President would like to copy Singapore’s zero-tolerance policy. The US Constitution stands in his way.

Presidents are much more constrained in issuing and rolling back regulations than they or the public think.

President Trump is calling on the Justice Department to ban bump stocks, but it seems clear that this is an area where Congress needs to be taking the lead.

Donald Trump’s dereliction of duty in response to clear evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election is a staggering and flagrant dereliction of the duties he agreed to take on when he took the Oath Of Office more than a year ago.

The prospects for extending legal protections for DACA beneficiaries are getting grimmer by the day.

The tragedy in Florida last week revealed once again how hyperpartisanship is destroying our politics and harming the country.

Al Hoffman Jr., a Florida-based real estate developer who was a leading fund-raiser for George W. Bush’s campaigns, said he would seek to marshal support among other Republican political donors for a renewed assault weapons ban.

Another day, another Court ruling against the Trump Administration.

A bipartisan group of Senators has proposed a largely reasonable fix to the DACA problem, but its fate remains unclear.

Poland’s new Holocaust legislation just keeps sounding worse and worse.

Despite what his own intelligence chiefs are saying, President Trump still does not believe that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

Israeli police have recommended that charges be brought against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Whether that damages him politically remains to be seen.

With time seemingly running out, the Senate debate over extending DACA is moving slowly.

If Trump is able to insist upon a package deal or no deal at all, he may muck up his chance of policy success, but it may be the Democrats who lose politically.

Republicans spent the eight years of Obama Administration railing against fiscal irresponsibility. Now that they have power, they’re the ones being fiscally irresponsible.

Congress seems likely to pass a budget deal today that will massively increase spending, putting to rest once and for all the rank hypocrisy of Republicans when it comes to claims that they are “fiscally conservative.”

Congress appears to be moving closer to a budget deal even as the President tries to throw a monkey wrench into the whole thing.

Poland’s President has signed a controversial bill that purports to criminalize any effort to tie Poland to the Holocaust.

Congress seems no closer to a DACA deal than they were in January.

The current budget deal expires in six days and Congress doesn’t seem to know what it’s going to do about it.

In addition to deadlines on the Federal Budget and DACA, Congress also has to deal with the debt ceiling at some point in the next month.

In May, Irish voters will vote on a referendum to remove the near-universal ban on abortion in the nation’s Constitution. And it looks as though it will pass.

Once again, President Trump is going soft on Russia. Why? I’ll leave that up to the reader to decide.

Democratic norms are eroding.

The Polish Government appears ready to approve a law that seeks to whitewash the truth about the role that many Poles played in the Holocaust.

Despite mounting evidence and outrageous behavior, Republicans nationwide and on Capitol Hill continue to do the Administration’s dirty work. They’ll most likely live to regret it.

America’s closest European allies are rebuffing the Trump Administration’s efforts to renegotiate the nuclear deal with Iran. They’re right to do so.

Less than a day after the President appeared to make a major concession regarding DACA, the White House has thrown a monkey wrench into the whole process.

Democrats in the Senate appear ready to de-link DACA from the budget. That would remove the threat of a government shutdown, but it could anger their base.

Getting to a DACA deal isn’t going to be easy.

It’s been seven years since Congress eliminated earmarking, and what we’ve seen has provided good evidence for the argument that it should never have been eliminated.

While final votes remain to be taken, the Federal Government shutdown effectively ended this afternoon with an overwhelming bipartisan vote to reopen the government, combined with a commitment from Republicans to consider a DACA bill over the next three weeks. What happens next, though, is entirely uncertain.

As the Federal Government shutdown moves into the work week, there are some rumors of a possible deal, but nothing concrete and the lack of trust between the two parties could make a deal hard to achieve.

President Trump called on Senate Republicans to eliminate the legislative filibuster to resolve the government shutdown. That’s not going to happen.

The government is shut down and Washington is playing the usual blame game. In reality, there’s plenty of blame to go around, and one of the guilty parties is the American people.

Both #TrumpShutdown and #SchumerShutdown put the blame in the wrong place.

One year after his Inauguration, Donald Trump is the most unpopular new President since the invention of modern polling. However, his numbers are generally the same that they’ve been for some time now.

With just hours to go, it seems increasingly unlikely that the Senate can reach a deal to keep the government open.

With less than two days to go, the prospects for Congress finding a way to prevent a government shutdown aren’t looking good.

Norway is poised to make some big changes to its drug laws.

With only days to go, Congress seems unable to come up with either a funding deal for the Federal Government or a solution to the DACA issue.

Late last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case involving the question of whether online and out-of-state businesses can be required to collect sales taxes in states with which they have no connection.