Category: Notes from the Field

Notes from the Field — July 7, 2026 In 1934, Congress passed a law to stop ranchers from destroying the public range. Ninety-two years later, the agency that law created is rewriting its own rules — and the rewrite removes the public from the room. This is Broken Frames Block 9’s argument, documented in real…

Notes from the Field — July 23, 2026 There is a sentence in the Constitution that has sat mostly dormant for forty years, doing nothing, waiting. It says the House judges its own elections. Not a court. Not a state. The House. Article I, Section 5 gives each chamber of Congress sole authority to decide…

Notes from the Field — Dispatch, June 30, 2026 Congress built the ladder in 1974, in the wreckage of Watergate, to keep large money from walking straight into a candidate’s campaign account. On June 30, the Supreme Court removed the last rung. The case was National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission — brought by…

Notes from the Field — Dispatch, June 29, 2026 On the same afternoon, the Supreme Court told the president two different things about the same power. Both cases asked the same question: can the president remove the head of an agency Congress built to be independent of him? In Trump v. Cook, the answer was no…

Notes from the Field — Dispatch, June 29, 2026 British American Tobacco is cutting 9,000 jobs. It expects the move to save $793 million a year by 2028. The company will eliminate 5,500 roles outright and hand another 3,500 to outside partners like Accenture — about a fifth of its global workforce, though not, the company…

Notes from the Field — Dispatch, June 25, 2026 Captain Lugo said no, and it cost him his post. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office has operated under federal court oversight since 2013, when Judge G. Murray Snow found that deputies under then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio had systematically racially profiled Latino drivers. The settlement, Melendres v. Arpaio, put…

Notes from the Field — Dispatch, June 22, 2026 In nine months, the federal government has tried at least nine different ways to find out who is allowed to vote in November. It has lost nine times. The mechanisms keep changing. The target does not. On June 22, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the…

 Notes from the Field — Dispatch, July 8, 2026 The story arrived as a backlog problem. The Department of Justice needed cases moving faster, so it added judges, tightened timelines, and told the ones already on the bench to stop giving children the extra months their cases used to take. What the coverage did not…

 Notes from the Field — Dispatch, June 22, 2026 The U.S. Department of Education cannot be closed. Congress created it by statute in 1979, and only Congress can end it — a fact the current administration has never disputed, because it hasn’t needed to. On June 16, the department announced it was handing its two…

Notes from the Field — Dispatch, June 22, 2026 In 2000, Florida sent county election officials a list of roughly 58,000 “suspected felons” to purge from the voter rolls. The matching criteria were loose enough that a name could be flagged on a 70 to 80 percent resemblance to someone else’s — no matching birthdate…