Democrats are trying to leverage the must-pass bill to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies; the Trump administration is tying a shutdown to potential mass federal worker layoffs. The current battle focuses on expiring subsidies for the Affordable Care Act that Democrats say will hurt the ability of millions of enrollees to afford insurance.

David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation .” You can follow him on Threads ( @davidfrenchjag ).

President Donald Trump's firing of the head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for publishing revised employment data the president did not like caused considerable public outrage. Since the bureau is part of the Department of Labor, it was clearly ...

The basic facts of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1944 decision in Korematsu v. United States, which upheld President Franklin Roosevelt's wartime internment of Japanese-Americans, are well-known but still worth a sketch. That is because the case serves as an all-too-timely warning about how judicial deference to executive power has warped American law.