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Why crisis authority claimed under real pressure is never handed back, why reforms with broad stated support do not pass, and the one question a citizen can ask about any declaration.
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The mid-nineteen-seventies reform that was supposed to end open-ended emergency declarations, and the court decision that turned its off-switch into a supermajority requirement.
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The authority a government may claim when it declares that ordinary rules cannot apply, and what is supposed to make that authority end.
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What an ordinary citizen can actually observe when force is used in their name — the reports filed, the legal reasoning published, the notifications required, and the votes that were and were not held — and how to tell a claim under a statute from a claim of inherent executive power.
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There is a particular kind of clarity that comes from following a chain of causes rather than staring at its final link. Several of the productions in this dispatch do exactly that — trace something backward far enough to make the present legible. Others hold the present up to a standard written...
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Whether Congress should reclaim the power to declare war, whether a deliberative body can hold a power that sometimes must be exercised in hours, and which proposed fixes actually change the incentive that keeps the vote from happening.
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How a force measure works as ordinary legislation — what the operative language actually says, how a grant keyed to one attack came to cover organizations that did not exist when it passed, and why taking a statute off the books is harder than putting it on.
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The clearest grant of authority in the founding document and the one most completely abandoned — why the United States has fought for generations without declaring war, and what filled the gap when formal declarations stopped.
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A permanent secret establishment created in peacetime and answerable to almost no one who is not inside it — what the investigations of the nineteen-seventies actually found, what was built in response, and whether any of it constrains anyone now.
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A permanent secret establishment created in peacetime and answerable to almost no one who is not inside it — what the investigations of the nineteen-seventies actually found, what was built in response, and whether any of it constrains anyone now.
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A permanent secret establishment created in peacetime and answerable to almost no one who is not inside it — what secrecy is legitimately for, who decides what falls inside it, and whether any standard for trusting the people who hold it comes with a mechanism that can enforce it from outside.
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A permanent secret establishment created in peacetime and answerable to almost no one who is not inside it — what the investigations of the nineteen-seventies actually found, what was built in response, and whether any of it constrains anyone now.