Separation of Powers

Commercial fishing is a tough way to make a living. The industry is highly competitive; revenues from year to year can be highly variable; the work is physically demanding and dangerous; and fishermen find themselves at the mercy of severe weather and choppy waters on a daily basis. But even those challenges are less taxing than going up against th ...

In their Feb. 19 op-ed "Precedents for the Eric Adams Case," James Copland and Rafael Mangual detail the Justice Department's decadeslong practice of extracting behavior-altering agreements from defendants in exchange for deferring or declining prosecution. But their examples are exclusively of private citizens or corporations. When the defenda ...

The Trump administration is racking up injunctions from federal courts, halting its efforts to shrink the federal government. From the funding freeze to the federal worker buyout, judges have put many of the administration's early executive actions on hold. For example, on February 10, 2025, a federal court found that the Trump administration had ...

The firing of federal workers has been a controversial topic since President Donald Trump began his second term in January. That controversy is warranted. The loss of a job is a difficult event for anyone who faces it. But there is a second reason these firings of government workers have caught everyone's attention. Firing employees and officers of ...

If you're expected to comply with hundreds of federal rules and regulations that affect your livelihood, wouldn't you like to know that those rules come from people accountable to you in some way? That's how our laws are made, after all. They come from Congress, which is accountable to the people through the democratic process. Yet much of what ...

Here's a scary prospect: an unelected shadow government operating beyond the limits of the Constitution and the separation of powers, and doing so with no accountability. Many are portraying President Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, this way. Tasked with modernizing technology, increasing efficiency, and rooting out waste, ...

Happy Thursday, SCOTUS Lovers. There weren't any arguments over the past two weeks, but here's a quick update on what else was happening at the marble palace that never sleeps. Political accountability is for lovers On Valentine's Day, the Trump administration asked the justices to weigh in on the president's power to remove ...

Much has been made of Vivek Ramaswamy's exit from DOGE to focus on other aspirations. Some have reported that Elon Musk and Ramaswamy had different visions for DOGE. While Elon Musk has been focused on boosting entrepreneurship, Ramaswamy was focused on constitutional separation of powers. And both are right. While Musk focuses on the symptoms, ...

How's everyone's neck doing? Because mine is suffering from a serious case of whiplash. In President Biden's first 100 days, he undid over 60 of President Trump's executive orders. President Trump has now repaid him in kind, revoking almost 100 of President Biden's in just the first few weeks after taking office. Accompanying some of these revoc ...