"Ex-Marine Asks Soviet Citizenship"
-- Washington Post headline, Nov. 1, 1959 (concerning a Lee Harvey Oswald)

"He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It's -- it had to be some silly little Communist."
-- Jacqueline Kennedy, Nov. 22, 1963

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court must feel as though it is plowing an ocean as it repeatedly reminds Congress that the anodyne label "campaign finance reform" can encompass a multitude of sins. Come Tuesday, the court will have another occasion to consider that not all regulations of the indispensable means of disseminating political speech -- money -- are constitutional just because they are presented as means of preventing corruption or its "appearance."

WASHINGTON -- "If Reince Priebus from Kenosha, Wis., is the Republican 'establishment,' God help us," says the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus. His physical presence is almost as unprepossessing as James Madison's was, and his demeanor is self-deprecating. But with meticulous -- Madisonian, actually -- subtlety, he is working to ameliorate a difficulty that has existed for two centuries and in 2012 wounded the GOP.

WASHINGTON -- In January 1938, Rep. Louis Ludlow, an Indiana Democrat, proposed a constitutional amendment strongly supported by the public: "Except in the event of an invasion of the United States or its territorial possessions and attack upon its citizens residing therein, the authority of Congress to declare war shall not become effective until confirmed by a majority of all votes cast thereon in a nationwide referendum."

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama's foreign policy dream -- cordial relations with a Middle East tranquilized by "smart diplomacy" -- is in a death grapple with reality. His rhetorical writhings illustrate the perils of loquacity. He has a glutton's rather than a gourmet's appetite for his own rhetorical cuisine, and has talked America to the precipice of a fourth military intervention in the crescent that extends from Libya to Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON -- Nowadays the federal government leavens its usual quotient of incompetence with large dollops of illegality. This is eliciting robust judicial rebukes, as when, last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia instructed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to stop "flouting the law."

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama's increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency.

WASHINGTON -- "Colleagues," said the June 27 letter to 98 U.S. senators, "now it is your turn." The letter's authors are Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the chairman and ranking Republican on the tax-writing Finance Committee, respectively. From their combined 71 years on Capitol Hill they know that their colleagues will tiptoe gingerly, if at all, onto the hazardous terrain of tax reform.

DETROIT -- This city is the broken tooth in Michigan's smile. Nevertheless, the preternaturally optimistic governor, from whom never is heard a discouraging word, cheerfully describes his recent foray with a crew cleaning up a park in a particularly, well,challengingneighborhood:

DETROIT -- In 1860, an uneasy Charles Darwin confided in a letter to a friend: "I had no intention to write atheistically" but "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars."