Pending legislation titled the Special Counsel Independence and Integrity Act states that only the Justice Department can fire special counsels and only for “good cause” — in effect codifying an existing Justice Department regulation. The bill would give the special counsel 10 days to dispute the firing in court. If a panel of three Federal judges determined that the firing was not for “good cause,” the special counsel would be reinstated. In the interim, his staff and investigative materials would be preserved. Senator Lindsey Graham (SC-R) introduced the Sen­ate bill (S. 2644) with cosponsors Senators Chris Coons (DE-D), Thom Tillis…

President Trump’s infrastructure plan, unveiled on Feb­ruary 12, would direct $20 billion toward a new “Transformative Projects Program” for “ambitious, exploratory, and ground-breaking project ideas that have significantly more risk than standard infrastruc­ture projects.” One of the first such innovations that could be fund­ed through the program, according to Undersecretary of Transportation Derek Kan, is the Hyperloop system, a project of SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk. The concept envisions a network of low-pressure tubes that carry passengers and cargo between cities in hovering capsules, reducing travel time from hours to minutes. Maryland transportation officials have already grant­ed authority for…

On March 14, the House passed, 407 to 10, H.R. 4904, the STOP School Violence Act. Introduced by Representative John Rutherford (FL-R), the bill would authorize $50 million in grant funding for schools to con­duct training to prevent violence, set up anonymous re­porting systems for threats, and implement other safety measures. Representative Rutherford said, “The best way to keep our students and teachers safe is to give them to tools and the training to recognize warning signs to prevent violence from ever entering our schools’ grounds … this bill aims to do just that.” A Senate companion measure, S. 2495,…