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Saying they fear President Trump with his finger on the nuclear trigger, two congressional Democrats introduced legislation Tuesday that would prevent the White House from launching a nuclear first strike without a declaration of war from Capitol Hill.

Sen. Edward J. Markey and Rep. Ted W. Lieu said their bill was designed to put a check on Mr. Trump, who during the presidential campaign had sent mixed signals on his thoughts about nuclear proliferation and the possibility of a U.S. first strike.

Treaties and official agreements between nations designed to solve a particular problem are notoriously tricky to create and then police, but measuring their success is normally pretty simple. Either they work well, or not at all.

What has come to be called the U.S.-China Cyber Agreement, however, has not fallen neatly into either category. The general consensus in government and private circles is that the number of cyberattacks emanating from China appears to have declined, though in fact thosere attacks are still taking place.

Senator Ed Markey and Rep. Ted Lieu introduced legislation intended to prevent President Donald Trump from using nuclear weapons in a first-strike scenario without the explicit approval of Congress on Tuesday.

The legislation is titled the "Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2017." The two legislators issued a press statement on the bill co-signed by William Perry, who served as secretary of defense in former President Bill Clinton's administration.

A Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group filed a lawsuit Monday alleging that President Trump is violating the U.S. Constitution by illegally receiving foreign payments through his businesses.

Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump, drew widespread criticism Sunday after she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's press briefing on inauguration crowd sizes, saying the newly minted spokesman had given "alternative facts" to those cited in media reports.

Chuck Todd, of NBC's "Meet the Press," asked Conway early Sunday morning why Mr. Trump had Spicer utter a "falsehood" the first time he formally faced reporters from the White House briefing room.

Miami is not where Jon Cowan expected to be on Inauguration Day.

He was certain he would be holding a champagne glass and toasting the nation's first female president alongside the inaugural parade route at the Washington pub Elephant & Castle. "It was this unbelievable space where we were going to have this large gathering of Democrats," said Cowan, who runs the left-of-center think tank Third Way.

Yvette Clarke, a Democratic congresswoman from Brooklyn, New York, had initially planned on attending Donald Trump's inauguration out of respect for tradition and the institution of the presidency. But last week, she started to waver. "We had the opportunity as members of Congress to attend the intelligence community briefing about what took place in terms of hacking and the intrusion of the Russian government into our electoral processes," she told me.