Author : Stephen M. Feldman
Publisher : Temple University Press
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 40,90 MB
Release : 2021-08-13
Category : Law
ISBN : 1439921598
"Challenges the argument that court-packing will politicize the Court and undermine its institutional legitimacy, arguing that the "law-politics dichotomy" is a myth because politics always has and always will influence Supreme Court decision-making"--
Author : Ilya Shapiro
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 33,57 MB
Release : 2020-09-22
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1684510724
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2021: POLITICS BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL "A must-read for anyone interested in the Supreme Court."—MIKE LEE, Republican senator from Utah Politics have always intruded on Supreme Court appointments. But although the Framers would recognize the way justices are nominated and confirmed today, something is different. Why have appointments to the high court become one of the most explosive features of our system of government? As Ilya Shapiro makes clear in Supreme Disorder, this problem is part of a larger phenomenon. As government has grown, its laws reaching even further into our lives, the courts that interpret those laws have become enormously powerful. If we fight over each new appointment as though everything were at stake, it’s because it is. When decades of constitutional corruption have left us subject to an all-powerful tribunal, passions are sure to flare on the infrequent occasions when the political system has an opportunity to shape it. And so we find the process of judicial appointments verging on dysfunction. Shapiro weighs the many proposals for reform, from the modest (term limits) to the radical (court-packing), but shows that there can be no quick fix for a judicial system suffering a crisis of legitimacy. And in the end, the only measure of the Court’s legitimacy that matters is the extent to which it maintains, or rebalances, our constitutional order.
Author : Jeff Shesol
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 673 pages
File Size : 31,8 MB
Release : 2011-03-14
Category : History
ISBN : 0393079414
"A stunning work of history."—Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of No Ordinary Time and Team of Rivals Beginning in 1935, the Supreme Court's conservative majority left much of FDR's agenda in ruins. The pillars of the New Deal fell in short succession. It was not just the New Deal but democracy itself that stood on trial. In February 1937, Roosevelt struck back with an audacious plan to expand the Court to fifteen justices—and to "pack" the new seats with liberals who shared his belief in a "living" Constitution.
Author : Mike Lee
Publisher : Center Street
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 39,66 MB
Release : 2022-06-07
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1546002359
In this national bestseller praised by Mark Levin and Sean Hannity, a leading conservative senator explains how the left’s partisan push to pack the Supreme Court with liberal justices has fully migrated from the fringes into the mainstream of Democratic politics. It wasn’t long ago that liberal icons, including the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, were against the idea of overhauling the court for political gain. But now, in the Biden era, more and more powerful Democrats are getting behind the cause, claiming the high court is broken and actively dismantling our democracy. Even Joe Biden—who once called court-packing a “bonehead idea”—gave in to the progressive wing of his party, appointing a committee to examine “reforms” to the court after being sworn in as president. In Saving Nine, Mike Lee, a brilliant legal mind, details the history of the current composition of the Supreme Court and strongly warns against the norm-shattering precedent that would be set by politically motivated attempts to turn the Supreme Court into just another partisan weapon.
Author : Michael Grunwald
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 545 pages
File Size : 39,41 MB
Release : 2012-08-14
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1451642342
In a riveting account based on new documents and interviews with more than 400 sources on both sides of the aisle, award-winning reporter Michael Grunwald reveals the vivid story behind President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus bill, one of the most important and least understood pieces of legislation in the history of the country. Grunwald’s meticulous reporting shows how the stimulus, though reviled on the right and the left, helped prevent a depression while jump-starting the president’s agenda for lasting change. As ambitious and far-reaching as FDR’s New Deal, the Recovery Act is a down payment on the nation’s economic and environmental future, the purest distillation of change in the Obama era. The stimulus has launched a transition to a clean-energy economy, doubled our renewable power, and financed unprecedented investments in energy efficiency, a smarter grid, electric cars, advanced biofuels, and green manufacturing. It is computerizing America’s pen-and-paper medical system. Its Race to the Top is the boldest education reform in U.S. history. It has put in place the biggest middle-class tax cuts in a generation, the largest research investments ever, and the most extensive infrastructure investments since Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. It includes the largest expansion of antipoverty programs since the Great Society, lifting millions of Americans above the poverty line, reducing homelessness, and modernizing unemployment insurance. Like the first New Deal, Obama’s stimulus has created legacies that last: the world’s largest wind and solar projects, a new battery industry, a fledgling high-speed rail network, and the world’s highest-speed Internet network. Michael Grunwald goes behind the scenes—sitting in on cabinet meetings, as well as recounting the secret strategy sessions where Republicans devised their resistance to Obama—to show how the stimulus was born, how it fueled a resurgence on the right, and how it is changing America. The New New Deal shatters the conventional Washington narrative and it will redefine the way Obama’s first term is perceived.
Author : David M. Faris
Publisher : Melville House
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 14,73 MB
Release : 2018
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1612196950
The American electoral system is clearly failing more horrifically in the 2016 presidential election than ever before. In It's Time to Fight Dirty, David Faris expands on his popular series for 'The Week' to offer party leaders and supporters concrete strategies for lasting political reform - and in doing so lays the groundwork for a more progressive future. With equal parts playful irreverence and persuasive reasoning, It's Time to Fight Dirty is essential reading as we head toward the 2018 midterms... and beyond.
Author : Linda Greenhouse
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 45,89 MB
Release : 2022-10-04
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0593447948
The gripping story of the Supreme Court’s transformation from a measured institution of law and justice into a highly politicized body dominated by a right-wing supermajority, told through the dramatic lens of its most transformative year, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning law columnist for The New York Times—with a new preface by the author “A dazzling feat . . . meaty, often scintillating and sometimes scary . . . Greenhouse is a virtuoso of SCOTUS analysis.”—The Washington Post In Justice on the Brink, legendary journalist Linda Greenhouse gives us unique insight into a court under stress, providing the context and brilliant analysis readers of her work in The New York Times have come to expect. In a page-turning narrative, she recounts the twelve months when the court turned its back on its legacy and traditions, abandoning any effort to stay above and separate from politics. With remarkable clarity and deep institutional knowledge, Greenhouse shows the seeds being planted for the court’s eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade, expansion of access to guns, and unprecedented elevation of religious rights in American society. Both a chronicle and a requiem, Justice on the Brink depicts the struggle for the soul of the Supreme Court, and points to the future that awaits all of us.
Author : Mark Tushnet
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 18,28 MB
Release : 2020-07-14
Category : Law
ISBN : 0300252900
How the Supreme Court’s move to the right has distorted both logic and the Constitution What Supreme Court justices do is far more than just “calling balls and strikes.” The Court has never simply evaluated laws and arguments in light of permanent and immutable constitutional meanings. Social, moral, and yes, political ideas have always played into the justices’ impressions of how they think a case should be decided. Mark Tushnet traces the ways constitutional thought has evolved, from the liberalism of the New Deal and the Great Society to the Reagan conservatism that has been dominant since the 1980s. Looking at the current crossroads in the constitutional order, Tushnet explores the possibilities of either a Trumpian entrenchment of the most extreme ideas of the Reagan philosophy, or a dramatic and destabilizing move to the left. Wary of either outcome, he offers a passionate and informed argument for replacing judicial supremacy with popular constitutionalism—a move that would restore to the other branches of government a role in deciding constitutional questions.
Author : John O. McGinnis
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 309 pages
File Size : 29,47 MB
Release : 2013-11-01
Category : Law
ISBN : 067472626X
Originalism holds that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted according to its meaning at the time it was enacted. In their innovative defense of originalism, John McGinnis and Michael Rappaport maintain that the text of the Constitution should be adhered to by the Supreme Court because it was enacted by supermajorities--both its original enactment under Article VII and subsequent Amendments under Article V. A text approved by supermajorities has special value in a democracy because it has unusually wide support and thus tends to maximize the welfare of the greatest number. The authors recognize and respond to many possible objections. Does originalism perpetuate the dead hand of the past? How can originalism be justified, given the exclusion of African Americans and women from the Constitution and many of its subsequent Amendments? What is originalism's place in interpretation, after two hundred years of non-originalist precedent? A fascinating counterfactual they pose is this: had the Supreme Court not interpreted the Constitution so freely, perhaps the nation would have resorted to the Article V amendment process more often and with greater effect. Their book will be an important contribution to the literature on originalism, now the most prominent theory of constitutional interpretation.
Author : John Knox
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 33,87 MB
Release : 2004-09
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780226448633
"My name will survive as long as man survives, because I am writing the greatest diary that has ever been written. I intend to surpass Pepys as a diarist." When John Frush Knox (1907-1997) wrote these words, he was in the middle of law school, and his attempt at surpassing Pepys—part scrapbook, part social commentary, and part recollection—had already reached 750 pages. His efforts as a chronicler might have landed in a family attic had he not secured an eminent position after graduation as law clerk to Justice James C. McReynolds—arguably one of the most disagreeable justices to sit on the Supreme Court—during the tumultuous year when President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to "pack" the Court with justices who would approve his New Deal agenda. Knox's memoir instead emerges as a record of one of the most fascinating periods in American history. The Forgotten Memoir of John Knox—edited by Dennis J. Hutchinson and David J. Garrow—offers a candid, at times naïve, insider's view of the showdown between Roosevelt and the Court that took place in 1937. At the same time, it marvelously portrays a Washington culture now long gone. Although the new Supreme Court building had been open for a year by the time Knox joined McReynolds' staff, most of the justices continued to work from their homes, each supported by a small staff. Knox, the epitome of the overzealous and officious young man, after landing what he believes to be a dream position, continually fears for his job under the notoriously rude (and nakedly racist) justice. But he soon develops close relationships with the justice's two black servants: Harry Parker, the messenger who does "everything but breathe" for the justice, and Mary Diggs, the maid and cook. Together, they plot and sidestep around their employer's idiosyncrasies to keep the household running while history is made in the Court. A substantial foreword by Dennis Hutchinson and David Garrow sets the stage, and a gallery of period photos of Knox, McReynolds, and other figures of the time gives life to this engaging account, which like no other recaptures life in Washington, D.C., when it was still a genteel southern town.
