Category: Notes from the Field
-
The Complaint With Nowhere to Go
Notes from the Field — September 18, 2026 Six seats. Two commissioners. One complaint. A rule is only as real as the room where someone can say it was broken. Federal law bars anyone who holds federal office from directing how a political group spends money raised without contribution limits. On September 4, in the…
Written by
-
The Bench They Built to Hear Their Own Case
Notes from the Field — September 13, 2026 The coverage out of Utah this week arrives as a story about gender — women’s groups on one side, a patriarchal political establishment on the other, tradwife imagery flipped inside out. That framing is accurate as far as it goes, and the women who built it deserve…
Written by
-
The Definition Nobody Voted On
Notes from the Field — September 9, 2026 A 230-year-old word just got a “best reading.” Every ten years since 1790, the United States has counted the same thing: everyone living here. Not everyone who can vote. Not everyone born here. Everyone. The Constitution says so in language that doesn’t leave much room to negotiate…
Written by
-
The Death That Didn’t Count Until It Did
Notes from the Field — September 3, 2026 For several days at the end of August, the federal government’s own measles count for 2026 read zero deaths. An hour outside Philadelphia, two people were already dead. Pennsylvania confirmed the state’s first measles deaths in thirty-five years on August 25 — two unvaccinated residents of Lancaster…
Written by
-
The Prosecutor Who Wrote It Down
Notes from the Field — September 3, 2026 A federal agent shot a man through a closed door in Minneapolis in January. By September, the government had built two different cases about what happened that night — one against the man who got shot, and one against the agent who shot him. Only one of…
Written by
-
The Customs Law That Was Never About Customs
Notes from the Field — August 29, 2026 Twice this year, a federal judge told the Department of Homeland Security it didn’t have probable cause to seize a Minneapolis journalist’s YouTube records. Both times, DHS accepted the ruling and walked away from the warrant. Then it went and got the records anyway — through a…
Written by
-
The Company That Said No, and What Saying No Cost
Notes from the Field — August 27, 2026 In March, the Pentagon labeled the AI company Anthropic a national security “supply chain risk” — a designation built for foreign adversaries, applied for the first time to an American firm the government had spent the prior year trying to hire. On August 27, a federal judge…
Written by
-
The Rate Nobody Was Ever Required to Revisit
Notes from the Field — August 25, 2026 In 1989, England sold off its water. The terms of that sale — how much investors could take out, how much had to go back in — were set once, in a negotiation the public never sat in on, and they have not meaningfully changed since. Thirty…
Written by
-
What Idaho’s Law Used to Forbid
Notes from the Field — August 26, 2026 — For most of Idaho’s history, the law was blunt: a parent who let a child go without necessary medical care was guilty of a crime, and if the child died, that parent could be charged with manslaughter. The 1887 territorial code made no exception for belief.…
Written by
-
The Shield the Room Built for Itself
Notes from the Field — August 25, 2026 Executive privilege has always covered a narrow thing: a president’s conversations with the people inside his own government, so advisors can speak freely without every internal debate landing in a subpoena. On August 10, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — the executive branch’s own in-house…
Written by
