elections clause
The photograph is dated August 17, 2020, and it shows nothing more dramatic than a row of blue mailboxes outside a post office in Washington, sitting in the kind of heat that makes the asphalt shimmer. By that week the mailbox had become a partisan object. The new postmaster general,
separation of powers
By the first week of September 2026, none of the twelve annual appropriations bills has reached the President's desk, and the fiscal year ends in three weeks. This is not a crisis. It is Tuesday. The last time Congress passed all twelve on time, Bill Clinton was finishing
immigration
On the morning of March 1, 2003, somewhere in a regional federal building whose exact address the record doesn't preserve, a maintenance worker took down a brass plate that read U.S. CUSTOMS SERVICE and put up a temporary sign, stick-on vinyl, reading BUREAU OF IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS
executive power
On November 14, 1979, Jimmy Carter declared a national emergency over the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The hostages came home in January 1981. The emergency did not. It gets renewed every November by a one-paragraph notice in the Federal Register, a formality nobody in the current
appointments
On Monday, Governor Henry McMaster stood in front of cameras in Columbia and called his dead friend "irresistible" and "irreplaceable," then asked the man's sister to finish his work for him. Darline Graham Nordone will serve out the remainder of Lindsey Graham's
executive power
On July 6, 1798, John Adams signed a bill in a Philadelphia summer so wet with heat that congressmen fainted on the floor of Congress Hall, and the bill he signed gave the president the power to detain or deport, without trial, any citizen of a nation the United States