The Constitution makes clear that bondholders have to be paid, and other obligations aren’t ‘debt.’ Headlines last week claimed that the Congressional Budget Office had warned the U.S. “could default on its debt” as early as July if Congress didn’t raise the statutory debt limit. What the CBO director actually said was that “the government ...

The Constitution is clear: The power to govern federal elections belongs to state lawmakers. The Supreme Court considers on Wednesday whether the Constitution’s Elections Clause means what it says—that “the times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature ...

Democratic lawyers seek to hijack elections via state judges. The Supreme Court has a chance to stop them. Marc Elias, the leading Democratic election lawyer, complains that “a dangerous theory will have its day in court” this fall. That’s rich—he was instrumental in bringing it there by litigating the case that raises it. But his dire ...

A ‘suspension’ rather than an increase would hand an unconstitutional blank check to the president. Congress is about to begin another debt-ceiling fight, and it threatens the Constitution as well as America’s solvency. Over the past two years, Uncle Sam has borrowed and spent trillions of dollars to address Covid-19. Coronavirus spending ...

Why do we have to wear face masks? The official answer changes from week to week. “It’s a patriotic responsibility, for God’s sake,” President Biden said when asked on April 30 why he still did despite being vaccinated against Covid-19. But last week he recast mask mandates as a coercive sanction against the unvaccinated. “The rule is now ...

Democrats want to impose federal rules on elections for president. Congress doesn’t have that power. House Democrats have made election “reform” their top legislative priority. House Resolution 1, styled the For the People Act, would vitiate existing state election laws, federalize the rules of congressional and presidential elections, ...

The pandemic may justify extraordinary measures, but judges won’t accept the most draconian ones. The Covid-19 pandemic “has served as a sort of constitutional stress test,” Justice Samuel Alito observed this month. “The pandemic has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.” The setting underscored the point: ...

Democrats began litigating years ago, and quicker resolutions could have prevented problems now. Whoever first quipped “It’s all over but the counting” forgot about the lawyers. Over the past year, Democrats and their allies marched through state after state in an unprecedented legal campaign to upend longstanding rules of election ...

Her appellate-court opinions on gun rights and regulatory power are models of careful originalism. It speaks volumes that the early opponents of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation have almost nothing to say about the work that has defined her career. Her scholarly and judicial writings place her at the center of the mainstream consensus on ...

Delays will play havoc with federal Electoral College deadlines. Entire states could be disenfranchised. If the 2000 election provoked a constitutional crisis, the 2020 one is flirting with disaster. Debate over voting by mail has focused mostly on the potential for fraud and logistical difficulties. But there are also legal problems with ...

Congress kept companies from cooperating with the Arab boycott of Israel. It can follow that model now. Facebook, Google and Twitter announced this month that they will refuse to comply with customer-information requests from Hong Kong authorities until the companies review the implications of a new Chinese security law designed to ...

The Framers had good reason to keep the federal district apart from any state. Voting along party lines except for one Democratic dissent, the House last week approved a bill to grant statehood to almost all of the District of Columbia—and create two safe Democratic Senate seats in a city that typically votes 90% Democratic in ...

Federal leadership is crucial, but there are measures only states have the authority to take. The Covid-19 pandemic has led to extraordinary restraints on liberty, from international travel bans to state and local orders that businesses shut down, individuals avoid large assemblies and even stay home, and infected patients remain in ...

It’s nakedly political and procedurally defective, and so far there’s no public evidence of high crimes. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has directed committees investigating President Trump to “proceed under that umbrella of impeachment inquiry,” but the House has never authorized such an inquiry. Democrats have been seeking to impeach Mr. Trump since ...

The 14th Amendment gives the Trump administration the justification it needs. The Trump administration said Wednesday it will attempt to add a citizenship question on the 2020 census while complying with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Department of Commerce v. New York. Five justices held that the Census Act allows the question, but a ...

That is the deeper political and legal question behind today’s Supreme Court census case. The Supreme Court Tuesday will hear oral arguments in the Trump administration’s appeal of lower-court orders forbidding it to ask a citizenship question in the 2020 census. The justices’ task in Department of Commerce v. New York won’t be difficult: The ...

It’s a crime to conspire to ‘impair, obstruct or defeat’ government’s function using dishonest means. Did law-enforcement officials plot to remove President Trump from office? Andrew McCabe, former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, suggests they might have. In a recent interview, Mr. McCabe said that in May 2017 ...

Some in Washington want to unleash government to harass heretics who don’t accept the ‘consensus.’ Galileo Galilei was tried in 1633 for spreading the heretical view that the Earth orbits the sun, convicted by the Roman Catholic Inquisition, and remained under house arrest until his death. Today’s inquisitors seek their quarry’s imprisonment ...

The Supreme Court sent a clear message: Your clean-energy strong-arming campaign must stop. President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is dead and will not be resurrected. The cause of death was hubris. As a result, the plan’s intended victims—including the national coal industry, the rule of law and state sovereignty—will live to fight ...

A court rules that the House can sue the administration for its end-run on spending. When the House of Representatives filed a lawsuit last year contesting President Obama’s implementation of ObamaCare, critics variously labeled it as “ridiculous,” “frivolous” and certain to be dismissed. Federal District Judge Rosemary Collyer apparently ...

Rewriting ObamaCare laws on the fly is a violation of the constitutionally mandated separation of powers, 'So sue me" is President Obama's message to Congress. And on Wednesday the House of Representatives took up his taunt, authorizing a lawsuit to challenge the president's failure to faithfully execute provisions of the Affordable Care Act ...

By postponing the employer mandate, Obama has given millions of Americans the legal standing to sue. President Obama's announcement on July 2 that he is suspending the Affordable Care Act's employer health-insurance mandate may well have exposed his actions to judicial review—even though that is clearly what he sought ...

The 'death panel' is a new beast, with god-like powers. Congress should repeal it or test its constitutionality. Signs of ObamaCare's failings mount daily, including soaring insurance costs, looming provider shortages and inadequate insurance exchanges. Yet the law's most disturbing feature may be the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The ...

The Constitution commands that public debts be repaid. There is no such obligation to fund entitlement programs.

Three false arguments, pushed hard by the Obama administration and accepted on faith by the media and much of the political establishment, must be laid to rest if the American people are to understand the issues at stake in the federal "debt ceiling" debate. ...