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Constitution Tag

Two months ago, Harvard Law Professor and fiercely anti-Trump pundit Laurence Tribe bragged that "it's the president’s corrupt financial entanglements with foreign governments that I’ve always believed would bring him down in the end." More recently, Tribe declared that "the Trump strategy of denying, delaying, deflecting, and dissembling while continuing to defy the Constitution has all but run its course and that the chickens are finally coming home to roost.”

President Trump prevailed Wednesday morning in a lawsuit claiming that profits from his businesses violate the Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution. The case was brought by the attorneys general of Maryland and Washington D.C., who said that Trump properties, notably the Trump International Hotel in D.C., were siphoning business away from state-owned convention centers.

In one of the major cases of this term, the Supreme Court has refused to provide a role for federal courts in deciding so-called partisan gerrymandering cases. That is, cases in which the federal courts pass judgment on the political process that gave rise to sometimes unfair districts benefitting one party or another. It was a straight 5-4 conservative-liberal split.

There is no constitutional crisis regarding the House Intelligence Committee's unsuccessful attempt to get the unredacted Mueller report, including secret grand jury information, and the documents underlying the investigation. Disregard what Jerrold Nadler says about there being a constitutional crisis.

I wouldn't call our Founding Fathers perfect, but man did they leave us one of the greatest documents penned in the English language. Their brilliance provided America not only with the Bill of Rights, but with the Electoral College. Grumbles about the Electoral College have existed for a long time, but after President Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, its elimination shot to the top of the Democrats list of issues in their campaigns. Sen. Elizabeth Warren proclaimed her wish to abolish the Electoral College at a recent town hall, but I don't think she's given it much thought to the mess this would create.

In a long-awaited and predictable decision, Judge Jesse M. Furman in the Southern District of New York ruled Tuesday that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross violated federal administrative law when he decided to reinstate a citizenship question on the 2020 Census. Judge Furman, who was appointed by President Obama, barred the Census Bureau from inquiring about citizenship on census questionnaires anywhere in the country. There's a pretty good chance that this decision stands. 

The Supreme Court announced Friday that it would, once again, consider whether partisan gerrymandering can be so extreme that it violates the Constitution. The move comes after a term in which the justices had looked poised to impose some limits on partisan influence in redistricting, but ultimately seemed unable to agree on a workable standard for evaluating when state lawmakers cross a constitutional line.

Last night, the Fourth Circuit stayed Maryland and Washington, D.C.'s Emoluments Clause lawsuit against President Trump in its entirety, while scheduling oral argument in the case to begin on March 19, 2019. This means that the litigation will be completely paused until the court reaches a decision on the President's petition, which won't be for at least three months.

Vox's Matthew Yglesias believes that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should run for president. Hey, why not? What could possibly go wrong? Oh, and if she's not old enough—and, at 29, she's not—then it's time to "fix" the Constitution.