Outside the Beltway

It’s been a rough two years under Trump, but America’s institutions are surviving.

The relatively light sentence that Paul Manafort received is raising eyebrows. Hopefully it will lead to a long-overdue debate on sentencing reform.

Chelsea Manning is in jail for refusing to comply with a Grand Jury subpoena apparently related to an ongoing investigation of Julian Assange and Wikileaks.

Paul Manafort walked into court yesterday facing the possibility of 20 years in prison. He came away with a much better outcome.

A novel proposal for making SCOTUS appointments more responsive to election outcomes.

The Senate yesterday confirmed a 37-year-old to a lifetime Court of Appeals seat.

There appear to be enough votes in the Senate to pass the resolution disapproving President Trump’s border wall “emergency,” but there’s not enough Republican support to override an expected veto.

Last week, the House passed two bills to strengthen the laws regarding background checks for guns, but they’re not likely to even make it to the floor of the Senate.

President Trump personally overrode the objections of security officials, the White House Counsel, and the Chief of Staff to make sure his son-in-law got a security clearance.

The Supreme Court appears to be leaning toward letting a war memorial on public property stay in place.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is being charged with three charges of corruption even as he faces an election in just over a month.

Instead of merely seeking to block the President’s declaration of an “emergency” at the southern border, Congress should instead significantly amend the National Emergencies Act.

A Federal Judge in Washington, D.C. has upheld the Administration’s ban on bump stocks.

Michael Cohen, the President’s former lawyer and “fixer,” is set to deliver several bombshells in his testimony before Congress today.

The Supreme Court is set to hear oral argument in a case involving a World War I Memorial in the form of a cross on public land in Suburban Maryland.

Republicans face a choice in the coming days. Do they support the Constitution, or do they support Donald Trump? You can count on them making the wrong choice.

Cardinal George Pell, the top Catholic Cleric in Australia, has been convicted of sexually abusing boys in the 1990s.

A 2016 Trump Campaign staffer has filed a lawsuit against the President alleging that she was assaulted by Trump during the campaign.

After a decade of using the alleged problem of “voter fraud” to justify things like Voter ID Laws, Republicans are remarkably silent in the fact of an actual example of fraud and election tampering.

A bipartisan group of foreign policy luminaries says there is no factual basis for President Trump’s claim.

Gun laws requiring guns to be taken away from convicted felons are either being ignored or have too many loopholes. We need to fix that.

Now that women are allowed into all combat roles, the rationale for excluding them from Selective Service has evaporated.

There’s only one solution to the D.C. statehood issue. It’s called retrocession.

A new poll shows that most Americans believe the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision should remain the law on the land. Opinion on other abortion-related issues is more divided.

A student in Florida has been charged with creating a disturbance after declining to recite the Pledge Of Allegiance in class.

Actor Jussie Smollett is charged with staging an attack initially called a “hate crime.”

Robert Mueller appears to be winding down his investigation and getting ready to submit a report to the Attorney General.

A Coast Guard officer and aspiring domestic terrorist was arrested late yesterday for plotting to kill Democratic politicians and members of the media.

The Supreme Court issued a ruling that places new limits on civil asset forfeiture by state and local government.

The American Civil Liberties Union has joined the list of groups with lawsuits against the President’s declaration of a “national emergency” at the southern border.

While I’m sympathetic to his plight, he has no case.

Roger Stone is being ordered to Court after an Instagram post that appears to be a direct threat against the Judge presiding over his criminal case.

Notorious RBG is back on the bench.

The lawsuits against President Trump’s “national emergency” have begun. Except more.

The shooter who killed five people in a factory in Illinois on Friday should not have had a gun to begin with.

The Supreme Court will hear a case dealing with a challenge to the Commerce Department’s decision to put a question about citizenship on the 2020 Census.

The ignominious saga of Anthony Weiner appears to have reached its end.

Pope Francis defrocked former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick after decades of allegations of abuse of young boys and seminarians.

Two new reports identify hundreds of Catholic Priests who have been credibly accused of abusing children over the past decades.

Supreme Court watcher Jeffrey Toobin speculates that Clarence Thomas could be the next Supreme Court Justice to step aside.

A confidential agreement has ended a collusion suit filed against the National Football League in 2017.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg returned to the Supreme Court today and appears to have fully recovered from her December surgery.

President Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border while at the same time undercutting his own case for doing so.

President Trump’s impending decision to declare a national emergency to get funding for his border wall will quickly face serious legal challenges. It may be more vulnerable than the White House suspects.

The President will sign the bill to fund the government and avert another government shutdown, but in doing so he’ll also lay the groundwork for another showdown with Congress.

William Barr was easily confirmed as Attorney General in a 54-45 votes that included three Democrats crossing over to support him.

A Federal Judge found that former Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort lied repeatedly after entering into a plea agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. This either makes him incredibly stupid or willing to sacrifice himself to hide the truth from Federal investigators.

The former #2 official at the FBI is trying to sell a book.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court rejected a challenge by three women to their prosecution for going topless on a public beach in the Granite State.

A death penalty case from Alabama raises First Amendment issues that the Supreme Court chose to brush aside.