The House passed H.Con.Res. 93 by 220 votes to 204 on 15 September, and the Senate, adjourned until 9 November, has not acted on it. The statute gives its committee fifteen days. The Senate has been setting its own clock.
The Supreme Court hears Beaird v. United States on Tuesday to decide how far judges must follow the Sentencing Commission’s notes on its own guidelines. The notes skip the process the guidelines go through, and in this case one of them added a year to the range.
King Mohammed VI named Fatima Ezzahra El Mansouri head of government on 29 September, but her party holds 97 of 395 seats and the constitution sets no date by which she must find 198. The 2027 Finance Bill, due at the House of Representatives by 20 October, is the only clock running.
Two days before the Russia sanctions law was due to take effect, the President waived nearly all of it, using the waiver the law itself provides. Ending a sanction under the Act would have needed a peace deal and a 30-day review by Congress. The waiver needs a certification and has no end date.
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Albania’s parliament cut the number of municipalities from 61 to 46 early on Friday. The constitution requires three-fifths of all 140 members for that law. It passed with 85 votes, one more than the minimum.
The International Criminal Court has found Rodrigo Duterte fit to stand trial on 30 November. The experts it relied on also proposed hourly breaks and no hearings before 11:00. The judges have kept the question of sitting hours for themselves.
Thailand’s opposition has filed a no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul and 17 ministers. Its 145 signatures are far short of a majority, but under the constitution the filing alone bars the House from being dissolved until the vote.
The Cook Political Report now sees a Democratic Senate majority in reach. In Kansas, a state that has not elected a Democratic senator since 1932, the race is a toss-up.
The Court of International Trade has certified a class of importers who paid tariffs the Supreme Court ruled unlawful in February. The judge wrote that about $30 billion in duties would stay with the Treasury if the refund portal stopped today, because it does not reach everyone who paid.
The Justice Department has filed to strip forty naturalized Americans of their citizenship, in what it calls the largest denaturalization effort in modern history. The legal tool is narrow. The signal is not.
India’s Election Commission said the Supreme Court had upheld the new declaration on its voter registration form. On Monday 5 October, the Chief Justice said the court had approved no modified Form 6.
The Fourth Circuit has ordered the FCC to rule by noon on Friday on whether party committees may buy airtime at the rate the law sets for candidates. The Supreme Court said last month the agency had to decide first. The administration has asked it to step in again.
Albertans vote on 19 October on ten questions, one of which asks whether the province should begin the legal process for a second, binding referendum on leaving Canada. The premier says there will be no further vote on separation while she is in office if the answer is no. Separatist leaders say they will keep going.
DHS put a rule into effect five days before it appeared in the Federal Register, then corrected it a week later. It skipped comment on two grounds, and the urgency it cites rests on the same legal conclusion the rule itself announces.
Shawn Fain won a second term as president of the United Auto Workers with more than two-thirds of the vote in unofficial results, and his slate swept most of the board. Only about one member in ten returned a ballot, and the vote did not settle the accusations, the federal investigation and the quarrel with the union’s monitor that ran through the campaign.
The Security Council has renewed its Sudan sanctions for two months, its second short rollover in a row, after a US push to extend the arms embargo beyond Darfur failed to win consensus. The panel that monitors the embargo was given three.
Labour kept Keir Starmer’s former seat on Thursday with a majority of 3,364. Fewer than four in ten registered voters took part, the lowest turnout at any by-election in England this parliament, and that figure sits underneath every reading of the result.
The Senate will meet eight more times before it returns on 9 November, each time with no business expected. The sittings keep it legally in session, which blocks recess appointments, and the funding deadline of 11 December waits on the other side.
Police detained the founder of India’s satirical “Cockroach” youth party on his flight into Delhi and sealed off the capital before a rally demanding the resignation of the chief election commissioner. The argument underneath is about the removal of some 130 million names from the electoral rolls, which the commission says was routine.
Mauritania’s prime minister submitted his government’s resignation on Friday after an inquiry into the substation fires that blacked out parts of the capital in August. The president reappointed him within hours. What changes is the cabinet, and the sources do not say whose seats are in question.
Romania’s fourth prime minister-designate since the government fell in May needs 233 votes in parliament, and the liberals have said they might supply some without joining his government. A vote to install a cabinet and a majority to run one are not the same thing, and the parties are negotiating over the gap.
Congress authorizes the spending and then, separately, authorizes the borrowing that pays for it. The ceiling governs the second step, not the first.
The Constitution gives Congress the power to lay duties. Congress has spent a century transferring that power to the executive in layers, and the transfers are hard to take back.
A grand jury does not determine guilt. It determines whether enough evidence exists to require a defendant to answer charges. The standard is lower than most people believe.
The Constitution grants the president authority to pardon offenses against the United States. The grant is broad and the limits are narrow. Most of what people believe constrains it does not.
Sometimes the office is smaller than the campaign.
Low information voters are not the problem people think.
One measure a marketing department cannot fake.
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