Hope vs. optimism, explained

Morning Report is The Hill’s a.m. newsletter. Subscribe here. In today’s issue: Two House members are on their way out of Congress as Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) announced their resignations Monday evening in the face of building efforts to expel them over sexual misconduct allegations. Swalwell’s announcement came first, completing his stunning...

Two men with a jug of moonshine, ca. 1915 | Corbis via Getty Images On Friday, a federal appeals court struck down a nearly 160-year-old federal law prohibiting people from distilling liquor in their own home.  That’s a fairly momentous event in its own right — any claim that a law that’s been on the books since Reconstruction is unconstitutional should be greeted with a heaping spoonful of skepticism. But the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s decision in McNutt v. US Depa

The U.S. military announced its latest strike on a suspected drug-trafficking boat in the Southern Hemisphere on Monday night. It was the third announced strike in April by the U.S. Southern Command. Two male suspected “narco-terrorists” were killed in Monday’s strike, which is part of the ongoing efforts to eliminate suspected narco-trafficking as part of […]

While many of the states that are growing are currently seen as safe red territory, today's Republican-voting states could be tomorrow's swing states.