At 10 a.m. on July 16, Texas Republican Pete Sessions called the House Rules Committee to order, and for two hours, members of the committee heard three accomplished constitutional scholars debate the principles of representative government established by the framers of the Constitution in 1776 and reaffirmed by the men who gave their last […]

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  I was in Paris when news broke of mass demonstrations following the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Images filled the media of police dressed in helmets and camouflage, wielding heavy artillery, riding in tanks, tear gas and smoke bombs exploding among crowds, huge dogs snapping and snarling and straining their leads. I […]

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Because of rulings from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court, the Republican governor and Legislature of Texas have succeeded in excluding as many as 844,000 eligible voters from this November’s national, state and local elections. Many of those voters are African-American or Hispanic. Many would have voted for Democratic […]

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  Can a single, ultra-rich media mogul create a grassroots network to rival the NRA? In April, media mogul and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg pledged to spend $50 million of his personal fortune to build a coalition of moms and mayors against gun violence. His new campaign, called Everytown for Gun Safety, is […]

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  The growing body of literature about the Roberts Court can be sorted into three categories. Some, like Jan Crawford’s Supreme Conflict and Jeffrey Toobin’s compulsively readable The Nine, combine analysis of the Court’s major decisions with journalistic scoops about its inner workings. Others, like Mark Tushnet’s In the Balance, assess its jurisprudence through the […]

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