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 John McCain in 1993 showed that a fierce maverick can become very deferential when facing little old ladies:

 

During non-pandemic times, different kinds of encounters take place at town halls:

 

Congressional Elections I

LAT article on home style and impeachment.

Competition

Incumbents Usually Win -- 2020

House and Senate margins  

Recruitment

• Notwithstanding 2018, GOP "bench" in 2020 was stronger than in the past

Control

Midterms Are Bad for the President's Party

The House

Gerrymandering: cracking, packing, merging, isolating

Unintentional gerrymandering -- NYT article

The dramatic decline in districts with split results

GOP Advantage in Non-Minority Districts

Democrats have surged in suburbs

The Senate

Senate classes (last year was a "class 2" election)

The vanishing of split delegations

Strategery!

• Party identification, party brand

Campaign Finance

"Hard money" contribution limits

Outside spending

Commercials!

Doyle McManus of LAT on 2020 ads:

• Best Senate ad, Republican: “We Can Do Better,” John James, Michigan. A GOP challenger admits that 2020 has been “terrible” and promises to bring change. [James narrowly lost.]
• Best Senate ad, Democratic: “Drain the Swamp,” Amy McGrath, Kentucky. A roughhewn Trump voter denounces Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s votes for trade deals as “crap, in my book,” and says he’s voting against McConnell because “36 years is long enough.” [She lost, bigly.]
• Best House of Representatives ad, either party: “Texas Reloaded,” Dan Crenshaw, Texas. A mock action movie joins six Republicans for “Mission Impossible.”  [See results here https://www.270towin.com/2020-house-election/states/texas ]

From 2018, maybe the meanest ad ever.  (The target of the ad won anyway.)

 The 2018 Funny Ad:

The 2016 military ad (Kander lost):

 

AND THE 2022 CYCLE IS ALREADY UNDER WAY!

Swearing on the Bible

Video resurfaces of Marjorie Taylor Greene, in 2019 wanting Muslim congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib to retake their oaths on a Bible.

 

 In 2017, former judge Roy Moore ran in a special Senate election in Alabama.  His spokesperson appeared with Jake Tapper.  Hilarity ensued.

 

 As I explained in class, the official swearing-in does not involve a Bible or any other book:

Members may choose a ceremonial photo where they re-enact the oath with any book of their choice.

In the Senate, agonostic  Kyrsten Sinema used a law book;

Congressional History and Impeachment

 For Next Monday, Davidson, ch. 3-4.

Wed. Davidson ch. 5 (Note revision of syllabus).

HAVE QUESTIONS FOR CANDACE VALENZUELA.

Congress and the Civil War

The congressional oath of office dates from this era.

Andrew Johnson Impeachment -- see esp. Article Ten

Impeachment v. Bill of Attainder

Persons subject to impeachment 

A separate process for disciplining members of Congress.

• Notorious MTG

The list

The House

• "Due process" does not apply.  
• The Fifth Amendment says no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Impeachment merely removes a person from office.
  

The Senate

• The majority makes the rules
• The role of the Chief Justice

The Grounds

• Treason
• Bribery
• High Crimes and Misdemeanors
• Gerald R. Ford 1970: "An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” 

The Special Case of the President

• The "take care" clause
• At Harvard Law Review, Andrew Kent.Ethan J. Leib, and Jed Handelsman Shugerman have an article titled "Faithful Execution and Article II." From the abstract:
  Article II of the U.S. Constitution twice imposes a duty of “faithful execution” on the President, who must “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” and take an oath or affirmation to “faithfully execute the Office of President.

Nixon

• Yes, there was a partisan dimension.
• A key staffer remembers...

Clinton

Lindsey Graham 1999: “What’s a high crime? ... Doesn’t even have to be a crime. It’s just when you start using your office and you’re acting in a way that hurts people, you’ve committed a high crime.” https://t.co/fYgIHpaHfE

— Jack Pitney (@jpitney) February 2, 2021

Trump Impeachment I

Writing Tips

For more detail -- along with links to model papers-- click here: https://www1.cmc.edu/pages/faculty/JPitney/writing.htm

• Revise and rewrite. (See the "paramedic method.")
• Never use a long Latinate word when a short Anglo-Saxon one will do. As William Zinsser says: "The English language is derived from two main sources. One is Latin, the florid language of ancient Rome. The other is Anglo-Saxon, the plain languages of England and northern Europe. The words derived from Latin are the enemy—they will strangle and suffocate everything you write. The Anglo-Saxon words will set you free."
• Cut needless words 
• Mindless introductory phrases (“It is important to keep in mind the fact that”);
• Redundancies ("This is a tough hurricane. One of the wettest we've ever seen from the standpoint of water." -- Donald J. Trump, September 18, 2018)
• Write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs.
• Shun the passive voice and forms of the verb to be. Use active verbs.
• Vary the length of your sentences and paragraphs.
• Do not shift from one verb tense to another if the time frame is the same.
• Make your point at the start. Use the rest of the essay to support it.
• Do not conclude with a mere summary.
• Never use contractions in academic writing.
• Proofread. The computer will not catch all your mistakes.
• Avoid "dropped quotations."
• For endnotes, use Arabic numerals, not lower-case Romans. (Click here to see how to change formats.) Follow these steps if you need to convert footnotes to endnotes.
• When referring to the legislative branch, capitalize Congress. When referring to political parties, capitalize Republican and Democratic.
• Choose your words carefully. Never use feel for think, verbal for oral, incredibly for very, or novel for a work of non-fiction.
• Stay off tangents. Cut anything that fails to advance your argument. In academic essays, avoid sermonettes. (“However, I feel that Franklin Pierce was an incredibly lousy president under who, the national polity was lead into it's crucial crisis ...”)

        

Congressional History, Fields of Blood

"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

From Article I, section 2

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

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.

Consequences of the Three-Fifths Clause.  From William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery:

Five of the first seven presidents were slaveholders [Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson], for thirty-two of the nation’s first thirty-six years forty of its first forty-eight, fifty of its first sixty four, the nation’s president was a slaveholder. The powerful office of Speaker of the House was held by a slaveholder for twenty-eight of the nation’s first thirty-five years. The president pro tem of the Senate was virtually always a slaveholder. The majority of the cabinet members and — very important — of justices of the Supreme Court were slaveholders. The slaveholding Chief Justice Roger Taney, appointed by slaveholding President Andrew Jackson to succeed the slaveholding John Marshall, would serve all the way through the decades before the war into the years of the Civil War itself; it would be a radical change of the kind slaveholders feared when in 1863, President Lincoln would appoint the anti-slavery politician Salmon P. Chase of Ohio to succeed Taney.

The size of Congress (Davidson 28-29) 

Statehood -- Matt Glassman reflects:

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 Congress

That’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 unambiguoulsy exacerbated the slave crisis: so manty 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 Scot decision.

Congressional Tenure (Davidson p. 35):

The book on violence in the antebellum Congress:




The title comes from this line, which provides the book's epigraph: In a letter to Senator Charles Sumner (MA) Rev. John Turner Sargent wrote that "blood would flow—somebody’s blood, either yours or Wilson’s, or Hale’s, or Giddings’— before the expiration of your present session on that field of blood, the floor of Congress.” 

Sargent was alluding to the burial place of Judas: "And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood. And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter's field, to bury strangers in. Wherefore that field was called, The field of blood, unto this day" (Matthew 27:6-8 KJV).

It was literally an atmosphere conducive to violence:

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, French thought that reading aloud to members was like reading “with his head stuck into an oven.” When the House moved to larger windowless quarters in 1857, the acoustics improved but the air didn’t. This wasn’t just a matter of cigar smoke, whiskey fumes, and body odor. A series of climate studies revealed the scope of the problem: no air was circulating in the chamber, and the wisp of a draft that rose through the floor grates had to pass through a layer of “lint, dirt, tobacco quids, expectoration, and filth of every sort.” One member claimed that the “confined and poisonous” air had caused “much sickness and even several deaths,” and indeed, a handful of congressmen died during an average session, though not necessarily because of the air. 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."

In 1856, Senator Sumner delivered his famous "Crime Against Kansas" speech.  He attacked the absent Andrew Butler (SC), saying he had " a mistress . . . who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean," the harlot, Slavery."

Two days later, Butler's cousin, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, responded:




You can see the cane in a Boston museum:



Lincoln-Douglas debates 


Congress and the Civil War

The congressional oath of office dates from this era.

Shifting partisan composition of Congress: