Questions on the assignment?
Presentation Wednesday on the CMC Washington Program
For Wednesday, Davidson ch. 5
Competition
Control
The gerrymander game
The Senate
Campaign Finance
Answer one of the following two options:
Option 1
Chapter 3 of the Davidson book begins with a short vignette about Rep. Derek Tran to introduce its core themes of ambition and recruitment. Write a replacement opening vignette featuring a different House member who won a first term in the 2024 election. In your vignette:
For next Monday, Davidson, ch. 3 and 4.
If you have not already done a writeup: Find one sentence in Chapter 2 you disagreed with. Quote it and explain why it does not fit how you think members of Congress actually behave today. If you cannot find one with which you disagree, find one that an ideologue of the left or right would dispute.
Institutional Evolution:
"All of American history comes from the Civil War. It is the most important event in our history. Everything before it led up to it, everything since, everything, is a consequence of it." -- Ken Burns
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." -- William Faulkner
Akhil Amar on the Three-Fifths Clause:
The radical vice of Article I as drafted and ratified was that it gave slaveholding regions extra clout in every election as far as the eye could see - a political gift that kept giving. And growing. Unconstrained by any explicit intrastate equality norm in Article I, and emboldened by the federal [3/5] ratio, many slave states in the antebellum era skewed their congressional-district maps in favor of slaveholding regions within the state. Thus the House not only leaned south, but also within coastal slave states bent east, toward tidewater plantations that grabbed more than their fair share of seats. ... The very foundation of the Constitution’s first branch was tilted and rotten.
And not just the first branch. The Article II electoral college sat atop the Article I base: The electors who picked the president would be apportioned according to the number of seats a state had in the House and Senate. In turn, presidents would nominate cabinet heads, Supreme Court justices, and other Article III judges.
John Quincy Adams
The relevant constitutional provision is Article 4, section 3:
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the CongressThat’s right. All it takes to create a new state is the passage of a federal law. Right now, assuming they were willing to use the nuclear option to abolish the filibuster for state admissions, any unified government could make Puerto Rico or DC a state, or (with the consent of the state leg) divide Texas (or Wyoming) into any number of states. With just a law. Irreversibly. And the constitution puts no population or land size constraints on the process either.
These three features of the statehood process—irreversibility, a low threshold for creation, and no population/size constraints on the creation of a state—made the statehood process incredibly destabilzing in the 19th century. Any majority, at any time, could rearrange the balance of power in the legislature and the electoral college. And it unambiguously exacerbated the slave crisis: so many of the major flashpoints over slavery between 1820 and 1860 involved the flawed statehood process: the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Lecompton Constitution fight, even the Dred Scott decision.
The book on violence in the antebellum Congress:
All this in a room that was hot, stuffy, and smelly. At the end of a typical day, with the galleries full and hours of body heat trapped in the chamber, [Benjamin Brown] French thought that reading aloud to members was like reading “with his head stuck into an oven.” ... Ongoing whimpering from the floor produced another study, this one demonstrating that it was thirty degrees warmer inside than outside and that the chamber smelled of sewage from the basement. Visiting the new chamber not long after it opened, French wasn’t impressed. The idea of “shutting up a thousand or two people in a kind of cellar, where none of God’s direct light or air can come in to them . . . does not jump with my notions of living,” he groused. Thirty years later, members still declared the House “the worst ventilated building on the continent."
For Monday, read Davidson ch. 1 and 2.
In this course, we will make Congress easier to understand. We will break it down piece by piece and ask how lawmakers behave back home with constituents, inside the maze of Capitol Hill, and on the national stage. We will examine congressional rules, committees, parties, and incentives, not as abstractions but as forces that determine real outcomes: Why do some bills become law while others quietly die? Who really has power, when, and why?
By the end of the course, you should be able to read congressional news with a trained eye and understand what is going on beneath the headlines.
Class meetings combine lecture and discussion. Come prepared: you should complete each week’s readings before class, since discussion will assume familiarity with them. We will also regularly analyze breaking news from Congress, so you should follow at least one good daily news source such as Politico or Axios.
Our class blog is at http://gov101.blogspot.com. I will post videos, graphs, news stories, and supplemental material there throughout the semester. Some of this content will come up in class; the rest is there to deepen your understanding at your own pace.
You will receive an invitation to post on the blog (let me know if you don’t). I encourage you to use it to:
Think of the blog as an extension of the classroom.
Your course grade will have these components:
The papers will develop your research, analytical, and writing skills. Writing quality matters. In grading and commenting, I will apply the principles of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. If you object, you should not take this course -- or any other course I teach.
In addition to the assigned readings, I may distribute short attachments or web links that address current events or supply background information. Your papers may draw on and analyze this material.
Participation includes both in-class and online engagement. I will call on students at random. Frequent absences or lack of preparation will affect your grade. The goal is not to catch you unprepared, but to help you develop the ability to think clearly and respond effectively under pressure—a skill that matters far beyond college.
"[A]fter 11 years as a legislator, I have grown tired of the increasing incivility and plain nastiness that are now common from some elements of our American community — behavior that, too often, our political leaders exhibit themselves ... Additionally, recent incidents of political violence have made me reassess the frequent threats against me and my family. " -- Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME)
No class Thursday:
Papers due tomorrow night at 11:59 pm.
In all bodies, those who will lead must also, in a considerable degree, follow. They must conform their propositions to the taste, talent, and disposition of those whom they wish to conduct; therefore, if an assembly is viciously or feebly composed in a very great part of it, nothing but such a supreme degree of virtue as very rarely appears in the world, and for that reason cannot enter into calculation, will prevent the men of talent disseminated through it from becoming only the expert instruments of absurd projects! If, what is the more likely event, instead of that unusual degree of virtue, they should be actuated by sinister ambition and a lust of meretricious glory, then the feeble part of the assembly, to whom at first they conform, becomes in its turn the dupe and instrument of their designs. In this political traffic, the leaders will be obliged to bow to the ignorance of their followers, and the followers to become subservient to the worst designs of their leaders.
Mickey Edwards: "People think what they think, not what we want them to think."
About “problems of political courage in the face of constituent pressures, and the light shed on those problems by the lives of past statesmen.’’ Three types of pressure:
Taft
On October 29, 1940, Congressman Lyndon Johnson happened to be in President Franklin Roosevelt’s office when FDR’s isolationist ambassador to London, Joseph Kennedy—at whom Roosevelt was furious for his freelancing and his insufficient outrage against Adolf Hitler—returned to the United States. LBJ omits the detail that as FDR invited Kennedy by telephone for dinner, he drew his finger across his throat, razor fashion. Johnson twits Roosevelt for his indifference to civil rights, contrasting that unfavorably with LBJ’s own record.
I was with President Roosevelt the day he fired Joe Kennedy. He picked up the phone and said, “Hello, Joe, are you in New York? Why don’t you come down and have a little family dinner with us tonight?” Then he hung up and said, “That son of a bitch is a traitor. He wants to sell us out.” Well, Kennedy did say Hitler was right.
Anyway, Roosevelt didn’t have any Southern molasses compassion. He didn’t get wrapped up in going to anyone’s funeral. Roosevelt never submitted one civil rights bill in twelve years. He sent Mrs. Roosevelt to their meetings in their parks, and she’d do it up good. But President Roosevelt never faced up to the problem.
Inherent limitations of Congress:
