House Democrats and White House Reach Deal Over Testimony by Ex-Trump Aide
A terse announcement signaled a possible end to a long-running constitutional lawsuit. But former President Donald J. Trump is not a party to the arrangement.
Donald F. McGahn II, a White House counsel under President Donald J. Trump, with Jared Kushner at the White House in 2017.Credit.Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
May 11, 2021
WASHINGTON The Biden administration and House Democrats have reached a tentative deal to allow President Donald J. Trump’s former White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, to testify before Congress about Mr. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia inquiry, according to a court filing late Tuesday.
Constitutional Challenges Loom Over Proposed Voting Bill
The sprawling legislation, known as H.R. 1, could result in lawsuits leading to a dozen Supreme Court cases, legal experts said.
Casting ballots in Des Moines in October. The voting rights bill passed by the House in March links many provisions that could face individual legal challenges.Credit.Kathryn Gamble for The New York Times
May 5, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON If the sweeping voting rights bill that the House passed in March overcomes substantial hurdles in the Senate to become law, it would reshape American elections and represent a triumph for Democrats eager to combat the wave of election restrictions moving through Republican-controlled state legislatures.
The Constitution Is More Than a Document â Itâs a Conversation
An original copy of âCommon Sense.âCredit.Stuart Ramson/Associated Press
Buy Book â¾
THE WORDS THAT MADE US
Americaâs Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840
By Akhil Reed Amar
When I was part of a legal team trying to establish that Alabama children in poor school districts had a right to equal educational funding under the state Constitution, we found an unexpected obstacle in our way. In 1956, Alabama had amended its Constitution to say that nothing in it should be construed as recognizing the right to an education. That prevented us from grounding our claim of a right to equal funding in a state constitutional right to be educated.
April 22, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
Credit.Amélie Landry/Agence VU, via Redux
Once again, the country is awash in gun violence. And once again, the justices have to decide whether to inject the Supreme Court into the middle of the gun debate. Will the first of those two sentences inform the second?
That’s really the question now, it seems to me. There is little doubt that the necessary four votes exist to add a Second Amendment case to the docket for decision, and there are plenty of candidates to choose from. One case under active consideration challenges New York State’s restriction on carrying a concealed gun outside the home. The justices have taken it up at their private conference twice this month and are scheduled to do so again on Friday.
Credit.Damon Winter/The New York Times
The anti-abortion movement was never going to stop with overturning Roe v. Wade.
For years, Republicans have argued that their goal was to return the issue of abortion to the states. At no point was this believable; since 1984, the Republican Party platform has called for a constitutional amendment banning abortion. Having spent decades denouncing abortion as a singular moral evil, the anti-abortion movement will not be content to return to a pre-Roe status quo, where abortion was legal in some places but not others.
So it’s not that surprising that, with the possible end of Roe in sight, some opponents of abortion are thinking about how to ban it nationally. Last week my colleague Ross Douthat wrote about a debate within the anti-abortion movement sparked by a highly abstruse article by the Notre Dame professor John Finnis in the Catholic journal First Things. Finnis argues that fetuses are persons under the 14th Amendment, and that the Su