President Donald Trump, as we all know, is a big fan of walls. Big, beautiful walls, according to him. But although he's never gotten Mexico to pony up a single peso for his border wall, and is still having trouble convincing Congress that it's the right thing to do, when future historians look back on this week, they might mark it as when Trump began constructing a metaphorical wall between his administration and Congress. Because the first big block of stone was just deposited on the White House lawn -- with 81 more big stone blocks waiting in the wings.

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Even though they haven't gotten nearly enough credit in the mainstream media so far, House Democrats are doing a pretty good job of "walking and chewing gum at the same time." They are investigating Donald Trump and everyone around him, as they were elected to do; but they are also producing some pretty impressive and forward-thinking legislative efforts as well. Their problem, though, is achieving much success in getting this message out in the media. What with Donald Trump's incessant tweeting and the presidential race beginning to take shape, the political media -- not the Democrats -- are the ones who seemingly can't manage to masticate and perambulate simultaneously.

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For the past few decades in American politics, the idea that a successful businessman would make a good president has been in vogue, most notably on the right. George W. Bush was supposed to be our first "C.E.O. president," and Donald Trump ran a goodly portion of his campaign on the idea that "only he" could fix all of America's problems, because he was such a wildly successful businessman.

Neither premise turned out to be true, of course. Bush was soon tested in a way no businessman ever has been -- by a massive terrorist attack and the question of how America should respond to it. Trump was never all that successful a businessman in the first place (see: his multiple bankruptcies), and continues to show a rather profound ignorance of the way macroeconomics actually works. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the subject of international trade.

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And then there were twelve....

It's been a few weeks since I last wrote about the Democratic presidential field, and we've had a few announcements in the meantime, so it's time once again to quickly run down who is running for president and who is not. If you think the answer to that first question is "pretty much everybody," well, you're not alone in thinking that. We're likely only about halfway through the announcement season, and we've already got a wealth of Democrats to choose from. It's already gotten to the point where sitting down with a blank piece of paper and listing them all is tough for even the wonkiest among us to do (I just tried this, even after I had been browsing the Wikipedia page on the subject, and I only managed to remember 11... I forgot to list Gillibrand...). And this is likely only going to get harder to do, as more and more people decide to jump in.

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In a bizarre development this week, President Donald Trump brought unity to all the politicians in Washington. He managed this feat by failing to get any deal out of his much-hyped summit meeting with North Korea's murderous dictator Kim Jong Un. When news of this failure on the international stage reached Washington (in [...]

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After yesterday's testimony before a House oversight committee, Michael Cohen is now being spoken of by some as "Trump's John Dean." This may be overstating the case a bit, but there certainly are parallels. Dean was a lawyer who flipped on Richard Nixon and worked with the prosecution and the Senate committee which was investigating Watergate, but Dean was a central figure in that scandal and held important jobs in the Nixon administration. Cohen is central to the hush money payoffs to Stormy Daniels, but by his own testimony was much more of a peripheral figure to the larger scandals facing Donald Trump right now. But just as Dean did in the Watergate investigation, Cohen may have provided an excellent roadmap indicating the direction congressional investigators should now take when it comes to exposing Trump's shadiness.

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Democrats are, if the political media is to be believed, in a soul-searching phase right now, deciding what exactly the party stands for and what they should run their next campaign on. They are deeply divided, the pundits tell us, between the "far left" and the pragmatists who don't want to win the primaries only to lose the general election. They can't even agree on which demographic will be the key one to delivering victory in 2020.

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The news media -- once again -- has been in a frenzy over the possibility that Robert Mueller will wrap up his investigation next week and issue his long-awaited report. They've gone down this road before, as have President Trump's legal advisors (who have been telling Trump the whole thing is going to be over very soon now for almost a solid year and a half). So you'll forgive us for not being all that convinced that this is indeed the time that Lucy won't pull the football away, and we'll finally get to kick it thumpingly down the field!

Perhaps we're being a wee bit too cynical? Maybe. But then again, maybe not. We'll see what next week brings.

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Will American voters "feel the Bern" in 2020? We're soon going to find out the answer to that question, since Senator Bernie Sanders just announced he'll be making a second run for the Democratic presidential nomination. To mix a few pyrotechnical metaphors, Bernie certainly caught fire once, but the question is whether lightning will strike twice for him again.

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But instead, today I'd like to look a bit further into the past, because there is one particular court case which everyone is going to be paying a lot of attention to in the upcoming weeks. The case is Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. Sawyer, usually now just referred to as the Youngstown case or "the steel case." The plaintiff was a steel company in Ohio and the defendant was the Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer. But the real defendant was President Harry Truman, who had directed the federal government to seize control of all the steel plants of the country, in order to avoid an imminent strike. Truman believed he had this power because American was in the midst of the Korean War at the time, therefore he reasoned he had presidential power to avoid disruptions to the war effort.

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