Download or read book Is Administrative Law Unlawful written by Philip Hamburger and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 646 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Hamburger argues persuasively that America has overlaid its constitutional system with a form of governance that is both alien and dangerous.” —Law and Politics Book Review While the federal government traditionally could constrain liberty only through acts of Congress and the courts, the executive branch has increasingly come to control Americans through its own administrative rules and adjudication, thus raising disturbing questions about the effect of this sort of state power on American government and society. With Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, Philip Hamburger answers this question in the affirmative, offering a revisionist account of administrative law. Rather than accepting it as a novel power necessitated by modern society, he locates its origins in the medieval and early modern English tradition of royal prerogative. Then he traces resistance to administrative law from the Middle Ages to the present. Medieval parliaments periodically tried to confine the Crown to governing through regular law, but the most effective response was the seventeenth-century development of English constitutional law, which concluded that the government could rule only through the law of the land and the courts, not through administrative edicts. Although the US Constitution pursued this conclusion even more vigorously, administrative power reemerged in the Progressive and New Deal Eras. Since then, Hamburger argues, administrative law has returned American government and society to precisely the sort of consolidated or absolute power that the US Constitution—and constitutions in general—were designed to prevent. With a clear yet many-layered argument that draws on history, law, and legal thought, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? reveals administrative law to be not a benign, natural outgrowth of contemporary government but a pernicious—and profoundly unlawful—return to dangerous pre-constitutional absolutism.

Download or read book The Naked Constitution written by Adam Freedman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-10-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the spirit of Glenn Beck’s Original Argument comes a lively manifesto on the need to recover the original meaning of the Constitution. From law school classrooms to the halls of Congress, America’s elites have come to regard the Constitution as a mere decorative parchment to be kept under glass at the National Archives. In The Naked Constitution, conservative legal scholar Adam Freedman defends the controversial doctrine of originalism as the only way to restore the Founding Fathers’ vision of American liberty. Freedman argues that the fashionable “Living Constitution” theory has been used by judges and politicians since the Progressive Era of the early 1900s to centralize power in Washington and to threaten individual freedom. The Naked Constitution explains the fundamental themes animating America’s founding charter: limited government, federalism, separation of powers, and individual liberty. Freedman explores the nature of each of the three branches of government as well as the key individual rights enshrined in the Constitution to show how original meaning can help answer the most pressing questions facing America today: Can the president invade another country without the approval of Congress? Can he assassinate or spy on American citizens in the name of fighting terror? Do corporations have the same “free speech” rights as individuals? Can the federal government coerce states to adopt particular policies, or force individuals to buy insurance? Ultimately, Freedman calls for a new constitutional convention that will free the nation from capricious courts and idiosyncratic judges, and limit the growth of government for decades to come.

Download or read book Mandate Madness written by James T. Bennett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do drivers' licenses that function as national ID cards, nationwide standardized tests for third graders, the late unlamented 55 mile per hour speed limit, the outlawing of the eighteen-year-old beer drinker, and the disappearing mechanical lever voting machine have in common? Each is the product of an unfunded federal mandate: a concept that politicians of both parties profess to oppose in theory but which in practice they often find irresistible as a means of forcing state and local governments to do their bidding, while paying for the privilege.Mandate Madness explores the history, debate, and political gamesmanship surrounding unfunded federal mandates, concentrating on several of the most controversial and colorful of these laws. The cases hold lessons for those who would challenge current or future unfunded federal mandates. James T. Bennett also examines legislative efforts to rein in or repeal unfunded federal mandates. Finally, he reviews the treatment of unfunded mandates by the federal courts. Those who find wisdom in America's traditional federalist political arrangement maintain perhaps with more wishfulness than realism that the unfunded federal mandate has not yet joined death and taxes as an immovable part of the modern political landscape.

Download or read book Race Reason and Massive Resistance written by David John Mays and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These private writings by a prominent white southern lawyer offer insight into his state’s embrace of massive white resistance following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. David J. Mays of Richmond, Virginia, was a highly regarded attorney, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, and a member of his city’s political and social elite. He was also a diarist for most of his adult life. This volume comprises diary excerpts from the years 1954 to 1959. For much of this time Mays was counsel to the commission, chaired by state senator Garland Gray, that was charged with formulating Virginia’s response to federal mandates concerning the integration of public schools. Later, Mays was involved in litigation triggered by that response. Mays chronicled the state’s bitter and divisive shift away from the Gray Commission’s proposal that school integration questions be settled at the local level. Instead, Virginia’s arch-segregationists, led by U.S. senator Harry F. Byrd, championed a monolithic defiance of integration at the highest state and federal levels. Many leading Virginians of the time appear in Mays’s diary, along with details of their roles in the battle against desegregation as it was fought in the media, courts, polls, and government back rooms. Mays’s own racial attitudes were hardly progressive; yet his temperament and legal training put a relatively moderate public face on them. As James R. Sweeney notes, Mays’s differences with extremists were about means more than ends--about “not the morality of Jim Crow but the best tactics for defending it.”

Download or read book Controversies in American Federalism and Public Policy written by Christopher P. Banks and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary collection presents a scholarly treatment of how the constitutional politics of federalism affect governments and citizens, offering an accessible yet comprehensive analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court’s federalism jurisprudence and its effect on the development of national and state policies in key areas of constitutional jurisprudence. The contributors address the impact that Supreme Court federalism precedents have in setting the parameters of national law and policies that the states are often bound to respect under constitutional law, including those that relate to the scope and application of gun rights, LGBT freedoms, health care administration, anti-terrorism initiatives, capital punishment, immigration and environmental regulation, the legalization of marijuana and voting rights. Uniting scholarship in law, political science, criminology, and public administration, the chapters study the themes, principles, and politics that traditionally have been at the center of federalism research across different academic disciplines. They look at the origins, nature and effect of dual and cooperative federalism, presidential powers and administrative regulation, state sovereignty and states’ rights, judicial federalism and the advocacy of organized interests.

Download or read book The Ideological Origins of American Federalism written by Alison L. LaCroix and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-15 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Federalism is regarded as one of the signal American contributions to modern politics. Its origins are typically traced to the drafting of the Constitution, but the story began decades before the delegates met in Philadelphia. In this groundbreaking book, Alison LaCroix traces the history of American federal thought from its colonial beginnings in scattered provincial responses to British assertions of authority, to its emergence in the late eighteenth century as a normative theory of multilayered government. The core of this new federal ideology was a belief that multiple independent levels of government could legitimately exist within a single polity, and that such an arrangement was not a defect but a virtue. This belief became a foundational principle and aspiration of the American political enterprise. LaCroix thus challenges the traditional account of republican ideology as the single dominant framework for eighteenth-century American political thought. Understanding the emerging federal ideology returns constitutional thought to the central place that it occupied for the founders. Federalism was not a necessary adaptation to make an already designed system work; it was the system. Connecting the colonial, revolutionary, founding, and early national periods in one story reveals the fundamental reconfigurations of legal and political power that accompanied the formation of the United States. The emergence of American federalism should be understood as a critical ideological development of the period, and this book is essential reading for everyone interested in the American story.

Download or read book Responsive States written by Andrew Karch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-28 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains how policy design and timing cause American state governments to greet national laws with enthusiasm, indifference, or hostility.

Download or read book The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism written by Matthew D. Lassiter and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism dismantles clichés about regional distinctiveness and rewrites modern American history through a national focus on topics such as the civil rights movement, conservative backlash and liberal reform, the rise of the Religious Right, the emergence of the Sunbelt, and the increasing diversity of the suburbs.

Download or read book Government s Greatest Achievements written by Paul C. Light and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an era of promises to create smaller, more limited government, Americans often forget that the federal government has amassed an extraordinary record of successes over the past half century. Despite seemingly insurmountable odds, it helped rebuild Europe after World War II, conquered polio and other life-threatening diseases, faced down communism, attacked racial discrimination, reduced poverty among the elderly, and put men on the moon. In Government's Greatest Achievements, Paul C. Light explores the federal government's most successful accomplishments over the previous five decades and anticipates the most significant challenges of the next half century. While some successes have come through major legislation such as the 1965 Medicare Act, or large-scale efforts like the Apollo space program, most have been achieved through collections of smaller, often unheralded statutes. Drawing on survey responses from 230 historians and 220 political scientists at colleges and universities nationwide, Light ranks and summarizes the fifty greatest government achievements from 1944 to 1999. The achievements were ranked based on difficulty, importance, and degree of success. Through a series of twenty vignettes, he paints a vivid picture of the most intense government efforts to improve the quality of life both at home and abroad—from enhancing health care and workplace safety, to expanding home ownership, to improving education, to protecting endangered species, to strengthening the national defense. The book also examines how Americans perceive government's greatest achievements, and reveals what they consider to be its most significant failures. America is now calling on the government to resolve another complex, difficult problem: the defeat of terrorism. Light concludes by discussing this enormous task, as well as government's other greatest priorities for the next fifty years.

Download or read book The Role of Telehealth in an Evolving Health Care Environment written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2012-12-20 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1996, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released its report Telemedicine: A Guide to Assessing Telecommunications for Health Care. In that report, the IOM Committee on Evaluating Clinical Applications of Telemedicine found telemedicine is similar in most respects to other technologies for which better evidence of effectiveness is also being demanded. Telemedicine, however, has some special characteristics-shared with information technologies generally-that warrant particular notice from evaluators and decision makers. Since that time, attention to telehealth has continued to grow in both the public and private sectors. Peer-reviewed journals and professional societies are devoted to telehealth, the federal government provides grant funding to promote the use of telehealth, and the private technology industry continues to develop new applications for telehealth. However, barriers remain to the use of telehealth modalities, including issues related to reimbursement, licensure, workforce, and costs. Also, some areas of telehealth have developed a stronger evidence base than others. The Health Resources and Service Administration (HRSA) sponsored the IOM in holding a workshop in Washington, DC, on August 8-9 2012, to examine how the use of telehealth technology can fit into the U.S. health care system. HRSA asked the IOM to focus on the potential for telehealth to serve geographically isolated individuals and extend the reach of scarce resources while also emphasizing the quality and value in the delivery of health care services. This workshop summary discusses the evolution of telehealth since 1996, including the increasing role of the private sector, policies that have promoted or delayed the use of telehealth, and consumer acceptance of telehealth. The Role of Telehealth in an Evolving Health Care Environment: Workshop Summary discusses the current evidence base for telehealth, including available data and gaps in data; discuss how technological developments, including mobile telehealth, electronic intensive care units, remote monitoring, social networking, and wearable devices, in conjunction with the push for electronic health records, is changing the delivery of health care in rural and urban environments. This report also summarizes actions that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) can undertake to further the use of telehealth to improve health care outcomes while controlling costs in the current health care environment.

Download or read book Public Policy Making written by Larry N. Gerston and published by M.E. Sharpe. This book was released on 2015-05-18 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This brief text identifies the issues, resources, actors, and institutions involved in public policy making and traces the dynamics of the policymaking process, including the triggering of issue awareness, the emergence of an issue on the public agenda, the formation of a policy commitment, and the implementation process that translates policy into practice. Throughout the text, which has been revised and updated, Gerston brings his analysis to life with abundant examples from the most recent and emblematic cases of public policy making. At the same time, with well-chosen references, he places policy analysis in the context of political science and deftly orients readers to the classics of public policy studies. Each chapter ends with discussion questions and suggestions for further reading.

Download or read book Safeguarding Federalism written by John D. Nugent and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains the dynamics of federalism in today’s policymaking process The checks and balances built into the U.S. Constitution are designed to decentralize and thus limit the powers of government. This system works both horizontally—among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches—and vertically—between the federal government and state governments. That vertical separation, known as federalism, is intended to restrain the powers of the federal government, yet many political observers today believe that the federal government routinely oversteps its bounds at the expense of states. In Safeguarding Federalism, John D. Nugent argues that contrary to common perception, federalism is alive and well—if in a form different from what the Framers of the Constitution envisioned. According to Nugent, state officials have numerous options for affecting the development and implementation of federal policy and can soften, slow down, or even halt federal efforts they perceive as harming their interests. Nugent describes the general approaches states use to safeguard their interests, such as influencing the federal policy, contributing to policy formulation, encouraging or discouraging policy enactment, participating in policy implementation, and providing necessary feedback on policy success or failure. Demonstrating the workings of these safeguards through detailed analysis of recent federal initiatives, including the 1996 welfare reform law, the Clean Air Act, moratoriums on state taxation of Internet commerce, and the highly controversial No Child Left Behind Act, Nugent shows how states’ promotion of their own interests preserves the Founders’ system of constitutional federalism today.

Download or read book Tensions of American Federal Democracy written by Jared Sonnicksen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tensions of American Federal Democracy uses an original analytical framework combined with comparative perspectives – including those of other modern federal democracies – to explore the jigsaw puzzle that is the state of American federal democracy. The USA has a complex political system prone to "divided government", which has become highly polarized in recent years. The reasons for this extend further and deeper than party diversification or rising populism. This book provides an original contribution encompassing the US polity and its overall development. The author explores how the US constitution has predisposed branches and levels of government to multiple forms of separation of power and constituency; and how developments in democratic and federal government over time have fostered more competition, diffusion, and decoupling, despite earlier trends to more cross-branch and cross-level cooperation. The book thus addresses a multifaceted inquiry, interrogating and conceptualizing the connections between institutions, ideas, and political development, while exploring the interlinkage between the institutional parameters of multidimensional division of powers, constitutional political ideas and their contestation, and the limitation of the state in the US federal democratic system. This book will appeal to students and scholars of political science, American government and constitutional politics, federalism, comparative politics, and political theory.

Download or read book Federalism on Trial written by Paul Nolette and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2015-02-23 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system,” Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1932, “that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory, and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” It is one of the features of federalism in our day, Paul Nolette counters, that these “laboratories of democracy,” under the guidance of state attorneys general, are more apt to be dictating national policy than conducting contained experiments. In Federalism on Trial, Nolette presents the first broadscale examination of the increasingly nationalized political activism of state attorneys general. Focusing on coordinated state litigation as a form of national policymaking, his book challenges common assumptions about the contemporary nature of American federalism. In the tobacco litigation of the 1990s, a number of state attorneys general managed to reshape one of America’s largest industries—all without the involvement of Congress or the executive branch. This instance of prosecution as a form of regulation is just one case among many in the larger story of American state development. Federalism on Trial shows how new social policy regimes of the 1960s and 1970s—adopting national objectives such as cleaner air, wider access to health care, and greater consumer protections—promoted both “adversarial legalism” and new forms of “cooperative federalism” that enhanced the powers and possibilities open to state attorneys general. Nolette traces this trend—as AGs took advantage of these new circumstances and opportunities—through case studies involving drug pricing, environmental policy, and health care reform. The result is the first full account—far-reaching and finely detailed—of how, rather than checking national power or creating productive dialogue between federal and state policymakers, the federalism exercised by state attorneys general frequently complicates national regulatory regimes and seeks both greater policy centralization and a more extensive reach of the American regulatory state.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of American Bureaucracy written by Robert F. Durant and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-08-02 with total page 888 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the major dilemmas facing the administrative state in the United States today is discerning how best to harness for public purposes the dynamism of markets, the passion and commitment of nonprofit and volunteer organizations, and the public-interest-oriented expertise of the career civil service. Researchers across a variety of disciplines, fields, and subfields have independently investigated aspects of the formidable challenges, choices, and opportunities this dilemma poses for governance, democratic constitutionalism, and theory building. This literature is vast, affords multiple and conflicting perspectives, is methodologically diverse, and is fragmented. The Oxford Handbook of American Bureaucracy affords readers an uncommon overview and integration of this eclectic body of knowledge as adduced by many of its most respected researchers. Each of the chapters identifies major issues and trends, critically takes stock of the state of knowledge, and ponders where future research is most promising. Unprecedented in scope, methodological diversity, scholarly viewpoint, and substantive integration, this volume is invaluable for assessing where the study of American bureaucracy stands at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, and where leading scholars think it should go in the future. The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics are a set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of scholarship on American politics. Each volume focuses on a particular aspect of the field. The project is under the General Editorship of George C. Edwards III, and distinguished specialists in their respective fields edit each volume. The Handbooks aim not just to report on the discipline, but also to shape it as scholars critically assess the scholarship on a topic and propose directions in which it needs to move. The series is an indispensable reference for anyone working in American politics. General Editor for The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics: George C. Edwards III

Download or read book The Politics of Public Utility Regulation written by William T. Gormley, Jr. and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010-11-23 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the important and increasingly controversial issues of utility regulation by combining a sophisticated understanding of these issues with a rigorous examination of various regulatory arrangements across the American states. It draws on interviews with participants in twelve states: public utility commissioners, commission staff members, utility company executives, governmental consumer advocates, and citizen activists. In addition to offering an up-to-date, comprehensive survey of regulatory politics at the state level, Gormley makes specific proposals for regulatory reform and emphasizes the importance (and difficulty) of assuring both expertise and accountability. Students of politics and public policy will find the state-level approach useful in examining the strategies of the "New Federalism" that transfer more and more formerly federal responsibilities to the states.

Download or read book Enhancing Food Safety written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2010-11-04 with total page 589 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent outbreaks of illnesses traced to contaminated sprouts and lettuce illustrate the holes that exist in the system for monitoring problems and preventing foodborne diseases. Although it is not solely responsible for ensuring the safety of the nation's food supply, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversees monitoring and intervention for 80 percent of the food supply. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's abilities to discover potential threats to food safety and prevent outbreaks of foodborne illness are hampered by impediments to efficient use of its limited resources and a piecemeal approach to gathering and using information on risks. Enhancing Food Safety: The Role of the Food and Drug Administration, a new book from the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, responds to a congressional request for recommendations on how to close gaps in FDA's food safety systems. Enhancing Food Safety begins with a brief review of the Food Protection Plan (FPP), FDA's food safety philosophy developed in 2007. The lack of sufficient detail and specific strategies in the FPP renders it ineffectual. The book stresses the need for FPP to evolve and be supported by the type of strategic planning described in these pages. It also explores the development and implementation of a stronger, more effective food safety system built on a risk-based approach to food safety management. Conclusions and recommendations include adopting a risk-based decision-making approach to food safety; creating a data surveillance and research infrastructure; integrating federal, state, and local government food safety programs; enhancing efficiency of inspections; and more. Although food safety is the responsibility of everyone, from producers to consumers, the FDA and other regulatory agencies have an essential role. In many instances, the FDA must carry out this responsibility against a backdrop of multiple stakeholder interests, inadequate resources, and competing priorities. Of interest to the food production industry, consumer advocacy groups, health care professionals, and others, Enhancing Food Safety provides the FDA and Congress with a course of action that will enable the agency to become more efficient and effective in carrying out its food safety mission in a rapidly changing world.