On November 12, 2025, Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) was sworn into office, fifty days after she won a special election to fill the seat of her late father, Raúl Grijalva (D), who had died earlier in the year. In this Congress Report, Deborah Kalb examines the fifty-day period between Grijalva’s election on September 23 and her swearing-in by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), which marked a modern-day record. During much of that time, from October 1 through November 12, the federal government…

Document Outline Conservative Bloc Liberal Bloc The Supreme Court’s 2024–2025 term was notable for numerous technical and procedural rulings on statutory interpretation and administrative law, cases on immigration and deportation brought by the Trump administration, and some of its typical hot-button social issues concerning individual rights. On the whole, the Court’s decisions were quite restrained. For instance, the Court did not strike down any state or federal laws as unconstitutional on…

The Supreme Court’s new term began in October 2025, and the Court had already either agreed to hear or scheduled oral arguments for several legally and politically significant cases centering on presidential power. The Trump administration has brought a record amount of litigation to the Supreme Court, first through the Court’s emergency docket (on whether to grant stays and injunctions) and now through the standard docket where the Court will rule on the substantive merits of some of Trump’s…

Several years ago, in order to be closer to family, voting and elections expert Rhodes Cook and his wife moved several hundred miles northwestward from the Washington, D.C., suburbs to Grand Rapids, Michigan. In this Election Report, Cook describes his observations of relocating from a decidedly Democratic area to arguably the leading battleground county in a battleground state. Document Outline Neighborhood…