President Trump’s lawyers, opposing the effort by House of Representatives committees to move ahead rapidly to get his financial records, have urged the Supreme Court to let that controversy go over to the new Congress that will not meet until January 3.  If a delay lasts that long, the subpoenas issued by the committees would… Read More

Looming over the election that occurs in 113 days is a refrain that is sure to be heard repeatedly from the White House, before and after the balloting: “The election was rigged!”  That may not be true of how the contest actually went, but it is bound to add to the uncertainty that already is… Read More

A troubled presidency, America knows from Richard Nixon’s sad demise, can collapse in a hurry, especially if the Supreme Court is unwilling to bend the rules to rescue such a regime.  From a ruling against him by the Court on July 24, 1974, a mere 15 days passed before Nixon resigned under a threat of… Read More

For centuries, religion has made the human condition not only more tolerable, but also more serene, comforted and spiritually uplifting.  But, over those same centuries, some acting in the name of religion have caused war and strife and contributed to actual worsening of the human experience. In America, religion has long been at the center… Read More

Every major case that the Supreme Court decides has the potential to settle a lot about what the nation’s laws or its Constitution mean.  Much of the time, though, the Court prefers to decide such a case narrowly, leaving serious questions unanswered. Today’s unanimous decision by the Court on the Electoral College is narrow like… Read More

When six of the nine Supreme Court Justices together write 133 pages of opinions, divided into six different perspectives, in the course of deciding one case, it may be difficult to figure out just what the Court has done. With today’s new abortion decision, however, that is easy: the 16 pages written by Chief Justice… Read More

The Affordable Care Act, which had its tenth anniversary in March, has never been free of some doubt about how long it might last. Almost from the beginning, there were frequent predictions of a “death spiral” setting in, because the huge law with so many inter-locking parts supposedly would collapse on its own. And, from… Read More

After eight years in operation, and multiple legal tests in the courts, the federal government’s program that has kept nearly 700,000 undocumented immigrants from being deported still faces a deeply uncertain future. It is true that the program – Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) — was saved by Thursday’s 5-4 decision by the Supreme… Read More

As future historians look back at the Trump years, they likely will conclude that a dominant feature was a massive growth in presidential power, only imperfectly checked by the other branches of government.  And they could find a very good illustration of that in the story of Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn. That tangled political… Read More

If the Supreme Court’s “live” audio hearings this month have done nothing else, they have definitely revived the debate over the issue of the Court’s transparency – that is, its openness (or lack of openness) to public examination as it does its work. Having once allowed itself to be observed directly (even if only the… Read More