George H.W. Bush: “Listen to this now, two days after Congress followed my lead [and authorized the first Gulf War], my opponent said this, and I quote directly: ‘I guess I would have voted with the majority if it was a close vote. But I agree with the arguments the minority made.’ Now sounds to […]
Bruce Ackerman
Bruce Ackerman is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale, and the author, most recently, of Revolutionary Constitutions: Charismatic Leadership and the Rule of Law (Harvard University Press, 2019).
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System Down
This has been a momentous month for campaign finance reform. Although the McCain-Feingold law has now been upheld by the Supreme Court, the traditional public funding system has been killed by a remarkable alliance between Howard Dean, John Kerry and President Bush. The two events are related. McCain-Feingold cut off the supply of large “soft […]
Posted inFeatures
For a Smarter Public, Deliberation Day
It is easy to wring one’s hands, especially with a presidential campaign approaching, over the scandalous state of the public’s knowledge about politics. But is there anything practical to be done? There is, and the answer can be found in a new and promising practice called Deliberative Polling. In Deliberative Polling, a scientific, random sample […]
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Raw Deal
Nobody can predict the future shape of the constitutional world that was created on September 11, but history can put it in perspective. This is not the first time American leaders have attempted a radical reorganization of the nation’s aims and ambitions. From the country’s founding through the civil-rights revolution, there have been many similar […]
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Never Again
A healthy constitutional system learns from its mistakes, and we have made a big one. Congress should never again write the president a blank check to make war. The precedent left by the first President Bush has cast a very large shadow on this present crisis. Before making his war in the Persian Gulf, Bush […]
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Two Fronts
The United Nations Security Council must now make two decisions on Iraq, but the Bush administration is focusing on only one. So far as President Bush is concerned, the big question is whether he can convince the council that Iraq is in “material breach” of its resolution on disarmament. But if the Security Council refuses […]
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Government by Half-Truth
The president owes us an explanation. The North Koreans had already told him about their nuclear weapons at the time Congress was debating war with Iraq. But he kept this information secret from the House and Senate. And he failed to mention it in his address to the American people in which he urged quick […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
The Broken Engine of Progressive Politics
The gears of the American change machine — presidents, parties, and social movements — no longer work together. A new view of America’s major political transformations, from Jefferson and Jackson down to the current disarray of progressive forces.
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$80,000 and a Dream
America has become a three-class society. While more than 25 percent of its children now graduate from four-year colleges, the lowest 20 percent inhabit a world of low wages and dead-end jobs. And then there is the vast middle. Despite the economic boom, real wages for men have declined, and only the massive entry by […]
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The Court Packs Itself
I n Justice John Paul Stevens’s despairing words, Bush v. Gore has shaken “the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.” Coming as it does from a justice known for his sobriety, this judgment should give all of us pause–and I mean Republicans no less than Democrats. We […]
