Rumors are spreading that the U.S. Supreme Court will vote 5-4 to rule that a U.S. president cannot be prosecuted for anything he does while he is president. Some Democrats are suggesting that Joe Biden bring a gun to his first debate with Donald Trump. If he shoots Trump, he would be immune, but if Trump shoots Biden he would be prosecuted because he is not a sitting president.   read more

A former U.S. naval officer who worked on nuclear-powered submarines, Sullivan began his political career in 2008, running as a Republican for an Eastern Connecticut congressional seat. He called for an end to the Iraq War, but opposed setting a date for U.S. troop withdrawal. He also called for increased spending for renewable energy and nuclear power. He later ran for state senate, calling for budget cuts and privatizing some social service programs, but lost to 84-year-old Edith Prague.   read more

Giancarlo moved into the trading world in 2000 as executive vice president and counsel for Fenics Software (later GFI), which made derivatives trading programs. While still at GFI in 2011, Giancarlo testified to the House Financial Services Committee urging a go-slow approach to regulating derivatives trading. In 2015, Giancarlo wrote a paper criticizing some of the CFTC’s reforms. His nomination to chair CFTC was warmly greeted by the investment industry, which is hoping for less regulation.   read more

As Alabama attorney general, Pryor backed efforts to establish the Alabama Sentencing Commission as a way to reform criminal sentences. Reliably conservative, Pryor called Roe v. Wade “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history,” and in a brief to the Supreme Court warned that if it recognized a constitutional right to homosexual sex, it would “logically extend” to activities like “prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, incest and pedophilia.”   read more

Mainzer's first job after grad school was at Enron, the power trading company that spectacularly collapsed in 2001. He then went to work for BPA, taking over as acting administrator/CEO in 2013 after then-administrator Bill Drummond was embroiled in a controversy involving failure to give proper preference to veterans in hiring and retaliating against BPA whistleblowers. Mainzer was named administrator and CEO in January 2014 and is credited with restoring employees’ confidence in the agency.   read more

Lewis made his name in managing ship production. As the Aegis program executive officer, Lewis led the delivery of seven Arleigh Burke class of guided missile ships and procured another 10 ships. As executive officer, Ships, he directed the delivery of 18 ships and procurement of another 51 ships. In 2003, Lewis wrote an article for the Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute decrying the time it took—more than a decade in some cases—to bring a new class of warship from conception to deployment.   read more

Kelley’s first stint at Arlington National Cemetery came in June 2012 as its chief of standards and evaluation and director of accountability. A year later, she was made director of enterprise management at the Army’s Information Technology Agency. In January 2014, Kelley was promoted to chief of staff of headquarters services in the Office of the Administrative Assistant to the Secretary of the Army. She held that position until moving back to Arlington National Cemetery as its superintendent.   read more

Tenn. State Sen. Mark Green—President Donald Trump’s second choice to serve as Secretary of the Army—has bowed out in the wake of bipartisan criticism of controversial statements regarding gays, transgender persons, Muslims, Latinos, birth control, and evolution. Green, who recently said “transgender is a disease,” has been a vocal opponent of gay Americans. He has publicly rejected the scientific theory of evolution in favor of a religious belief that God created everything without evolution.   read more

Bahr has been a professor in the Dept. of Geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1987, where she is also affiliated with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. Her research focuses on physical, geochemical, and biogeochemical controls on the movement of underground water. She served as chair of the Nelson Institute’s Water Resources Management Graduate Program from 1995 to 1999, and of the Geoscience Dept from 2005 to 2008.   read more

Lhamon learned about racism and civil rights early on, as her parents were activists, and she was the product of a mixed-race marriage; the Supreme Court had overturned laws against such marriages only a few years earlier. On April 6, 2017, Lhamon characterized the policy shift of the new Trump administration by saying, “The backstop that has been the civil rights enforcement of the federal government is no more.” The commission's role will likely be important during years of the Trump regime.   read more

In December 2016,Callahan was promoted to deputy director of the Secret Service, and became acting director in March 2017. It didn’t take long for him to encounter controversy. On March 10, 26-year-old Jonathan Tuan-Anh Tran entered the White House grounds and was not detected for 16 minutes. On March 16, it was discovered that an agency laptop was stolen from an agent’s car in New York. The laptop was said to have had security plans for Trump Tower and other sensitive information on it.   read more

Haskell was sent to Tel Aviv as consul in 1996. While there, in 1998, he was involved in the case of an American teen arrested and held by the Israeli government, which charged him of being a member of Hamas. As consul, Haskell monitored the case and urged his release. Haskell returned to Washington in August 2013 for a stint as office director in the Africa Bureau’s Office of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, where he was a member of the Ebola communications task force.   read more

It sometimes seems that the differences between the priorities of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are so great that they can’t agree on anything. Not so. Here are four programs that President Barack Obama’s last budget and President Donald Trump’s first budget proposed for complete elimination.   read more

Appointed Air Force chief of staff in 1990 by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, McPeak had helped plan the combat phase of the U.S.-led Persian Gulf War. He later criticized the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, calling it "a strategic blunder made worse by slapdash execution. As we have seen, [it] took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, breathed new life into a moribund al Qaeda, and enhanced Iranian influence in this critical region—all outcomes which damaged both the U.S. and our ally Israel.”   read more

Jarlstrom sued the Portland suburb, claiming it programmed its yellow lights to be so brief that drivers didn’t have time to make it through an intersection before they turned red, putting drivers in danger. After the judge tossed his suit, a state agency launched a two-year investigation of Jarlstrom, then fined him $500 for publicly critiquing the mathematical formulas behind traffic light cameras without an engineering license. Jarlstrom calls that a prohibition on free speech.   read more

From 2007 to 2010, Morrow served as FMS assistant commissioner of federal finance, responsible for managing nearly $3.2 trillion in annual federal revenue collections. From 2010 to 2012, she served as FMS assistant commissioner of payment management and chief disbursing officer, responsible for more than 1.2 billion payments each year, including tax refunds and Social Security, veterans’ benefits, railroad retirement, and civil service retirement payments.   read more

Trump’s numbers at 100 Days—usually one of the high points of a president’s popularity—are closer to those of a failing president than a newly minted one. Hovering around 40%, his approval is comparable to George W. Bush’s right after Hurricane Katrina, Gerald Ford’s during the 1975 recession, and Jimmy Carter’s during the Iran hostage crisis. Those presidents were so weakened by low public support that they failed to win re-election.   read more