Patrick McDonnell is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Previously he spent five years as an Army intelligence officer with deployments to Europe and Afghanistan. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect those of any agency or department of the United States Government.
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On Dec. 9, the Supreme Court heard a challenge to the constitutionality of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The case may determine Congress’s ability to limit the president’s removal power.
The Department of Homeland Security announced a policy that would force international students to leave the country or transfer if their universities went fully online. A week later, the rule was rescinded. What happened?
President Trump’s new executive order provides additional authorities to address medical supply shortfalls in combating COVID-19—but it doesn’t utilize any of them.
New rules governing foreign investment and acquisition of U.S. real estate recently took effect.
Editor’s note: This is one of many summaries of depositions released by House impeachment investigators. The others are available here.
Then-Rep. Gerald Ford once defined an impeachable offense as “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” But legal scholars have concluded that impeachment is considerably more law-governed, and constrained, than Ford suggested. They draw on clues from the Founders, the text and structure of the Constitution, and the history of presidential impeachments (and near-impeachments) to make varying arguments about the impeachment power and the range of impeachable offenses.
Last month, the military commission for the matter of United States v. Khalid Shaikh Mohammad et al. (i.e., the 9/11 trial) held a marathon three weeks of nearly back-to-back hearings. After being held up by delays in the publication and release of relevant transcripts, this post summarizes these proceedings and identifies several areas of potential interest, including testimony from two FBI special agents regarding their interviews with the defendants and their prior knowledge of alleged torture by the CIA.
September 9