Andrew Rudalevige

The House of Representatives’ Republican Conference has released instructions to its members on how to spend their summer vacations. It doesn’t involve much frivolity, unless one’s idea of holiday heaven involves writing (or at least cutting-and-pasting) op-eds, pumping gas, holding meetings with angry people and, most broadly, hating on Washington. Kicking off the 31 colorful […]

Why could the Obama administration collect data on – as it appears – pretty much every phone call you make? The answer seems to be a lesson in legislative drafting – since it resides in the wide grant of power Congress delegated to the administration in the Patriot Act (sorry, the USA PATRIOT Act: “Uniting […]

There have been various calls in recent days for the appointment of an independent counsel to explore and expunge the IRS’s selective investigation of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status after 2009. From the right, Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal claims, for instance,that “we are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since […]

During the April 2004 oral arguments in the Hamdi v Rumsfeld case about whether an American citizen could be detained indefinitely as an enemy combatant, Supreme Court Justice David Souter sought to probe the breadth of the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which the Court ultimately held did support Hamdi’s detention, albeit […]

This post’s title is not designed to drive web traffic from TMZ. No, really: President Obama has made it not only possible but necessary for me to take Ms. Swift’s name in vain as part of a quick follow-up to recent blogosphere commentary on the Obama “charm offensive” towards Congress. To wit: this weekend’s White […]

Most denizens of the political science blogosphere will know by now of the recent punditry doing violence to what political science knows about presidential success in Congress. First CQ’s David Hawkins, in his usually astute blog, declaimed that “the Obama charm offensive is starting to pay legislative dividends,” citing the 68 Senators who voted to […]

The president’s dinner with Senate Republicans, not to mention lunch with Paul Ryan, has prompted mostly complimentary coverage on his efforts to press the “re-set” button with congressional Republicans. Wonkbook even headlined its set of links to that coverage with the I-think-mostly-nonsardonic query “Is Washington suddenly working again?” In that vein, Ezra Klein rightly points […]

Former Office of Legal Counsel head and Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith adds a useful wrinkle to the drone debate in his discussion of House Intelligence chair Mike Rogers’s appearance on Face the Nation this weekend. On the face of it, at least, Rogers noted several important things about the drone program: The ancestry of […]

John Brennan’s confirmation hearing started, complete with early protesters being ejected from the hearing room, this afternoon. The protesters, of course, are a physical manifestation of the explosion in the scholarly blogosphere with regards to the release of the Obama administration’s legal justification of the president’s ability to order lethal drone strikes, even against American […]

You will recall that in January 2012, President Obama named Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and three new members to the National Labor Relations Board, all by recess appointment. The catch was that the Senate was not in recess—or at least said it wasn’t. Since 2007, originally in response to George […]