Outside the Beltway

Donald Trump is probably just messing around with all of us again, but he’s certainly acting like someone who’s running for President.

Hillary Clinton told supporters she’d require Supreme Court nominees to pledge to overturn Citizens United, a decision she completely misrepresented.

In a marked departure from recent cases, the Supreme Court rules that states can impose significant restriction on solicitation of campaign contributions in judicial elections.

The Roberts court has been very good on First Amendment issues, but it needs to address the First Amendment issue right outside its front windows.

Much of the criticism of Hobby Lobby, and Citizens United before it, is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what those decisions stand for.

However you feel about the Redskins name, the decision to retroactively repeal their trademarks is troubling on many levels.

All of a sudden, the IRS announced it doesn’t have communications records it once claimed it did have.

Once again, the Supreme Court reminds us that limiting political speech is unconstitutional.

Dinesh D’Souza has been indicted by a federal grand jury for being incredibly stupid.

Republicans have some good ideas about overhauling how they pick a nominee. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see how most of them can be enforced.

The Supreme Court heard argument in a major campaign finance case yesterday.

A new theory circulating on the right asserts that IRS targeting of Tea Party groups had an impact on the 2012 elections by diminish the Tea Party’s effectiveness. It’s mostly nonsense.

Almost no one can confidently explain, let alone define, the specifics of the 501(c)4 designation.

The impact of outside spending on the election turned out to be far less consequential than many had feared.

Opponents of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United continue to miss the point of what the case was really about.

Some thoughts on the voter registration/voter turnout debate.

Thanks to a media that focuses obsessively on irrelevancies, we now have a permanent political silly season.

Far from being deterimental, there is a case to be made that SuperPACs have actually expended democracy during this election cycle.

Billionaires have been free to donate as much money as they want to activist groups since the dawn of the Republic.

Virtually everything Stephen Colbert is doing was legal before Citizens United.

Stephen Colbert’s super PAC, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, has raised a little over a million dollars.

Some questions for opponents of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United.

There’s no law requiring Presidential candidates to release their tax returns. Should they be expected to do it anyway?

If you’re running low on cash, keeping it low-key in a state you can’t win sometimes make sense.

A new set of proposed Constitutional Amendments reveals that many people still don’t understand what Citizens United was about.

Gary Johnson is right to be upset that he’s been excluded from debates, but he shouldn’t get the government involved.

Another potential problem for the Cain campaign.

As of now, there’s no reason to believe that Mitt Romney won’t be the Republican nominee in 2012.

Rick Perry’s campaign isn’t dead by any means, but he needs to turn things around soon.

Although he didn’t get the words quite right yesterday, Mitt Romney was exactly right about corporations.

The Stephen Colbert Super PAC that began as a satire has now been blessed by the real FEC. What exactly this means is not yet clear.

Another major campaign finance case from the Supreme Court.

Both sides in the John Edwards case are heading into uncharted territory.

Stephen Colbert has been running an ongoing shtick in which he’s trying to start a political action committee, gets letters from his Viacom bosses poo-pooing the idea, and then inviting his lawyer on to explain ways to get around these concerns.

New York Times writer Adam Liptak discovers that a Supreme Court decision protecting “corporate speech” might not be a bad thing considering that he works for a corporation.

Three months after the allegations were first made. the FEC has opened a criminal investigation of Tea Party Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell

Keith Olbermann was reportedly suspended for failing to apologize for making political donations to Democratic candidates, but it really seems intended to serve to justify the illusion that MSNBC’s programming is not partisan.