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American Government
Enduring Principles and Critical Choices

To understand contemporary American politics and government stu-

dents need to see how political ideas, institutions and forces have
developed over time. The fourth edition of American Government
dwells on the seminal role played by political memory and path
dependency in shaping contemporary institutions, political forces,
and public opinion as well as the critical choices that have caused
them to shift course. It provides a comprehensive depiction of current
demographic, political, attitudinal, and governmental facts, trends,
and conditions. Each chapter begins with a detailed contemporary
portrait of its subject.

Marc Landy is Professor of Political Science at Boston College. He also

teaches in the Masters in American History and Government Program
at Ashland University. He is the coauthor of Presidential Greatness
and The Environmental Protection Agency from Nixon to Clinton. He
has written for many journals, including National Affairs, Political
Science & Politics and Public Administration Review.

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American Government
Enduring Principles and Critical Choices

Marc Landy
Boston College, Massachusetts

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Contents

Preface page vii

Acknowledgments x

1 Introduction 1

Part I Formative Experiences 25

2 Political Culture 27
3 Contesting the Constitution 56
4 Political Development 89

Part II Pivotal Relationships 129

5 Federalism 131
6 Political Economy 164

Part III Governing Institutions 197

7 Congress 199
8 The Presidency 239
9 The Judiciary 282
10 Bureaucracy 322

Part IV Political Life 353

11 Public Opinion 355
12 Political Parties 378
13 Campaigns, Elections, and Media 416
14 Political and Civic Participation: Movements, Lobbies,
Voluntary Associations, and the Role of Media 455
15 Concluding Thoughts 493

Index 499

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Preface

This book grows out of a friendship that developed from a deep intellectual
affinity. Sid Milkis and I met in 1984 when we were put on the same panel at
the American Political Science Association meeting. We found that we were both
preoccupied by the New Deal. Sid was trying to understand how it gave rise to the
modern administrative state. I was trying to figure out how Franklin Roosevelt
both embraced the labor movement and staved off the transformation of the
Democratic Party into a British-style Labor party. Soon after, Sid came to
Brandeis University, where I had become a Fellow of the Gordon Public Policy
Center. We had adjoining offices at the center and were able to continue our
conversations over lunch and coffee and at the center’s seminars. We discovered
that our common interests were not limited to Franklin Roosevelt and the New
Deal; we had both come to believe that the study of political science had been
severed from its historical roots and that our job was to graft the study of
contemporary politics back on to those roots. Both of us were already doing this
in our American politics teaching with very good results. We saw that students
developed a much keener and firmer grasp of current matters when they became
aware of the intellectual and institutional connections that the contemporary
issues and events had with the past. Sid applied this approach to his book The
President and Parties and to the textbook he coauthored with Michael Nelson,
The American Presidency: Origins and Development. Marc applied the approach
to essays about the labor movement’s impact on the development of American
politics. Together, we drew on the American political development framework in
our investigations for our book Presidential Greatness and our chapter, “The
Presidency in History: Leading From the Eye of the Storm,” in Michael Nelson’s
edited volume, The Presidency and the Political System. In the meantime, our
devotion to connecting past and present came to appear less eccentric; many
other scholars also began to find greater meaning and interest in bringing history
to bear on the study of American politics. American Political Development (APD)
has now established itself as one of the most active and intellectually vibrant
movements within political science.
The underlying premise of the APD approach is the conviction that to under-
stand contemporary American politics and governments, students need to under-
stand how political ideas, institutions, and forces have developed over time. In
Chapter 1, I invoke what William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead.
It’s not even past.” The past shapes our ideas, attitudes and sentiments endowing

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viii Preface

the present with meaning. Delving into the past reveals what key political and
governmental principles endure and what critical changes have occurred – hence
the book’s subtitle, “Enduring Principles, Critical Choices”. The book dwells on
the seminal role played by political memory and path dependency in shaping
contemporary institutions, political forces, and public opinion as well as the key
decisions that have caused them to shift course. The seminal fourth chapter
entitled “Political Development” dwells on those episodes when enduring prin-
ciples were most profoundly contested. The other chapters likewise elucidate the
critical choices that have shaped their specific subject.
Because the very purpose of the APD approach is to shed light on the present,
this book provides a comprehensive depiction of present demographic, political,
attitudinal, and governmental facts, trends, and conditions. Each chapter begins
with a detailed contemporary portrait of its subject. For example, the contempor-
ary portrait segment in “Campaigns, Elections, and Media” includes a detailed
description of the 2016 presidential election campaign. The portraits ground the
students in the most important facts and analytical principles regarding the
chapter subject, and comprise a brief guide to current politics and governments.
There are no separate chapters about civil rights, civil liberties, or public policy
because these subjects are so integral to American politics that they form key
threads woven into the fabric of the entire book. We do, however, devote an
entire chapter to political economy (Chapter 6). We believe that such a chapter is
necessary because so much of the substance of political discussion, partisan
conflict and policy-making is about economics. As the name, political economy,
implies, this chapter highlights the political forces that have shaped the insti-
tutional and legal framework in which economic activity takes place. Throughout
the book, students are made aware that what they are learning in their history
courses complements their political science understanding, and vice versa. Chap-
ter 6 shows them how the study of economics and of political science inform one
another as well.

New in the Fourth Edition

This new edition greatly strengthens the book’s coverage of political behavior
and the media, and is supported by materials on the Cambridge University Press
website, www.cambridge.org. Whereas Part IV of the previous editions, entitled
“Political Forces,” contained two chapters, Part IV of this edition, renamed
“Political Life,” now contains four. There is an entire chapter devoted to public
opinion. Campaigns and elections also have a chapter of their own as do political
parties. The consideration of media is now so central to both the campaigns and
elections Chapter and the political and civic participation chapter that the word
“media” has been added to the titles of both.

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Preface ix

The critical choice theme announced in the book’s subtitle now receives greater
emphasis. In each chapter the critical choices the chapter considers are high-
lighted. Each critical choice discussion begins with an introductory paragraph
that crystallizes the importance of the choice. It ends with a segment entitled
“Upshot” that illuminates the contemporary importance of the choice. To stimu-
late critical thinking, every chapter offers a critical thinking essay question based
on a controversial issue the chapter raises. For example, following the sections on
the spoils system and civil service reform in the chapter entitled “The Bureau-
cracy,” the following question is posed: “The spoils system distributes govern-
ment jobs on the basis of party loyalty. The civil service system relies on
competitive examination for that purpose. Discuss the strengths and weaknesses
of each approach. Which one do you favor?”
This edition provides many more graphs, maps, tables, and timelines than
previous editions did. These graphics serve to greatly enrich both the contempor-
ary portrait and the developmental components of each chapter and to
strengthen the analytic connection between past and present. They also render
the book’s content more readable and inviting.

Organization
Each chapter begins with an overview that uses a bullet format to highlight the
central themes of the chapter. Each of these bullets serves as a heading for each of
the different sections that comprise the chapter. Following the overview there is a
brief vignette that provides an evocative introduction to at least one of the key
themes bulleted in the overview. For example, the Congress chapter’s opening
vignette is about Congress’ consideration of President Trump’s cabinet nominees,
revealing how this process exemplifies the growing party polarization of Con-
gress. Next comes the “Contemporary Portrait” section described above. The rest
of the chapter is organized developmentally according to the chapter overview
bullets. The concluding section is entitled “Looking Forward.” It invites the
student to make use of insights from the chapter to consider an issue of great
present and future importance. For example, the political parties chapter looks at
the functions that political parties have historically performed and invites the
student to consider which of those functions they still perform; which they do
not; and why the loss of certain key functions are of critical importance going
forward. The chapter ends with a summary, organized on the basis of the section
headings, that focuses on the most important matters the chapter discusses.

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Acknowledgments

I thank the coauthor of the previous editions of this book Sidney Milkis for our
decades of fruitful intellectual collaboration. The editor of this edition, Robert
Dreesen, has been unstinting in his encouragement and support. The develop-
mental editor Brianda Reyes has provided very valuable guidance regarding how
to make the book more accessible to students, as well as a host of other helpful
suggestions. Jessica Goley, Thomas Goodman, Nick Allmaier, and Peter Wilkin
have been gracious, thoughtful, energetic, and diligent in their assistance. I thank
my good friend Steve Thomas, for the stimulating conversations we have had
about the book and his insights for improving it.

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1 Introduction

CHAPTER OVERVIEW
This chapter focuses on:
• Fundamental concepts of American politics and government.
• Why this book approaches the study of American politics and
government from the perspective of American political
development (APD).
• Why the American political system is biased in favor of the status quo.
• How critical choices operate to overcome the bias in favor of the
status quo and lead to transformative change.
• The aims of American government as outlined in the Preamble to
the Constitution; a brief introductory sketch of efforts to achieve
those aims and some of the most serious current controversies
those efforts provoke.

“I Have a Dream”
On August 28, 1963, 250,000 people marched on Washington to protest discrim-
ination against African Americans and to celebrate the rise of the civil rights
movement. Race relations in the South were dominated by so-called Jim Crow
laws, enacted at the end of the nineteenth century, which imposed racial segre-
gation in all aspects of life. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the
Supreme Court declared the so-called “separate but equal” doctrine in education
policy unconstitutional. Nonetheless, many Southern schools remained segre-
gated. Not since the turbulent Reconstruction Era that followed the Civil War had
the South been so alienated from the rest of the country.
When, starting in the mid 1950s, civil rights demonstrations broke out through-
out the South to protest this racial caste system, local police brutally repressed
efforts to break down what the distinguished African American sociologist
W. E. B. Du Bois had called the “color line.” When African American students

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2 Introduction

tried to enter Little Rock High School in September of 1957, a crowd of white
parents cursed and threatened them as the governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus,
blocked the door. The civil rights movement gained great momentum in
1960 when black and white students joined together to sit in at lunch counters
throughout the South demanding to be served. The wave of protests continued in
1961 as Northern blacks and whites took bus trips to the South and refused to
segregate themselves when they reached Southern bus terminal waiting rooms
and restaurants. A particularly ugly confrontation took place in Birmingham,
Alabama in September of that year, where one of the civil rights movement’s
most important leaders, Martin Luther King, Jr., was jailed. President John
F. Kennedy had been reluctant to take on civil rights, arguing that it was up to
local officials to enforce the law. After Birmingham, however, Kennedy gave his
support to a comprehensive civil rights bill making racial discrimination in hotels,
restaurants, and other public accommodations illegal and giving the attorney
general the power to bring suits on behalf of individuals to speed up lagging
school desegregation. The measure also authorized agencies of the federal gov-
ernment to withhold federal funds from racially discriminatory state programs.
To heighten awareness of their cause and to press for passage of Kennedy’s bill,
civil rights leaders organized the largest single protest demonstration in American
history. King’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial was its climax. Late in the
afternoon, the summer heat still sweltering, King appeared at the microphone.
The crowd, restlessly awaiting King’s appearance, broke into thunderous applause
and chanted his name. King began by praising Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclam-
ation as “a great beacon of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared
in the flames of withering injustice.” But, he continued,
one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One
hundred years later, the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and
the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of
poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the
Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in
his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.

This litany of oppression might have elicited anger; indeed, some of King’s
followers had been growing impatient with his peaceful resistance to Jim Crow
and its brutish defenders. But King, an ordained minister, spoke the words of
justice, not revenge: “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking
from the cup of bitterness and hatred.” A reverend might have been expected to
invoke the warnings of the biblical prophets in calling America to account,
instead King appealed to America’s charter of freedom. He called upon Americans
to practice the political and social ideals of the Declaration of Independence:

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and
the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every

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“I Have a Dream” 3

American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the
unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

King lamented that America had not lived up to those famous words. Even
after the Brown case had interpreted the Constitution so as to fulfill the promise
of the Declaration of Independence, segregationists prevailed. The promissory
note had come back marked “insufficient funds.”
Still, he counseled continued faith in the promise of American life. African
Americans should “refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” At the
same time, King warned, their faith in American justice could not last much longer;
the time had come “to make real the promises of Democracy.” “Now is the time to
rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlight path of racial
justice.” His indictment went beyond the South. “We can never be satisfied as long
as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has
nothing to vote for.” The crowd shouted and clapped in cadence with him. Inspired
by this surge of feeling, King abandoned his prepared text; but even as he spoke
“from his heart,” in words that would make this address memorable, King’s sermon
had a familiar ring, drawing again on the Declaration of Independence:

I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the
moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have
a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed:
“We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” When we let
freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state
and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men
and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands
and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God
almighty, we are free at last!”

Figure 1.1. The Unfinished Word of Martin Luther King. Cartoon by David Granger, 2011.
Source: Political Cartoons Com.

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4 Introduction

Fundamental Democratic Republican Concepts: Speech,

Leadership, Institutions

King’s speech is a fine place to begin this text because it shows that politics is not
just about power, greed, and ambition but also about the noblest sentiments of
the human spirit. It also vividly illustrates what American politics and govern-
ment are made of, their fundamental concepts. It was a speech and, in a free
society, most of political life is lived through speech. The various forms of speech
that politics employs – argument, explanation, exhortation, and discussion – are
what give it its distinctive character. Just as clay is the medium of sculpture,
words are the medium of republican and democratic politics. The brilliance of
King’s speech stems from his ability to artfully make use of what that medium has
to offer – metaphor, adjective, symbol, analogy. The speech was listened to by
hundreds of thousands of people. It was a public event. Unlike many other
activities – friendship, sex, reading or listening to music on an iPhone, politics
typically takes place in public. Not everyone is capable of commanding the
attention of a crowd the way Martin Luther King did. Those who can command
such public attention we call leaders. Followers have a big political role to play as
well, but the United States is a very big place and ordinary people have only a
very limited capacity to influence political life and make their voices heard.
Therefore, they are very dependent on leaders to represent, inspire, and command
them. King was not a professional politician. No matter. The key tasks of political
leadership are frequenly performed by those who do not even think of themselves
as politicians and who do not hold political office.
King’s speech took place in a very particular context and was intended to
achieve very particular goals. King’s goal was to pass civil rights legislation. The
very need to push hard for that goal implies that there is opposition to it. Other
people, and their leaders have other, conflicting, goals. Speech and leadership
give politics some of the qualities of theatre – vivid language, evocative acting.
But, as the word “goal” suggests, politics also ressembles sports. Competition can
be fierce. Foul play occurs and gets penalized if the perpetrators get caught. There
are winners and losers. Thus conflict and competition are also central to politics.
Politics also ressembles sports in that it is highly organized. The rules are
carefully laid out. Different teams develop a collective identity and persist over
time. The term used for the organizations that endure, command loyalty and
develop their own collective identities is institution. Martin Luther King was not
simply speaking to a crowd of individuals on that warm August day, he was
speaking to people with strong institutional affiliations – union members, church
congregants, lodge brothers, and sorority sisters. And he was appealing to leaders
of two powerful political institutions – the Democratic and Republican parties –
to press for action by one of the three central national governing institutions, the

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Fundamental Democratic Republican Concepts 5

United States Congress. King himself was not only the leader of a movement, he
was also the head of an important religious institution, the Ebenezer Baptist
Church. Chapter 3 will introduce an additional fundamental republican demo-
cratic concept: deliberation.

The American Polity: A Democratic Republic

The entire political story of civil rights, of which this speech is such an epochal
part, takes place within the frame established by one overarching institution, a
polity, the United States. It was the law of the United States that had the ultimate
authority to decide the outcome of the civil rights struggle. It was the legislature
of the United States that deliberated about and formulated the law. The citizenry
of the United States chose the members of that legislature. The United States is a
polity because it successfully claims the political allegiance of its members. Those
members may feel a deeper tie to their church or to some other institution to which
they belong, but it is the constitution and the laws of the United States that they are
compelled to obey. The governing institutions of the US provide them with their
political rights and responsibilities. Once in the history of the United States its
claim to being a polity was challenged. Southern states seceded and, temporarily,
formed a new polity, the Confederate States of America. It took a brutal war, the
Civil War, to defeat secession and restore the US’s status as a single polity.
The United States is unusual in that it went through a formal process of
constitution writing to become a polity. Many other polities such as Britain,
France, China, or Japan did not begin on any specific date, nor did they go
through a process of discussion and debate to become a polity. If this were a text
on comparative politics, it would be necessary to delve deeply into how those
other polities came into being; instead it focuses exclusively on the formation of
the American polity. Chapter 2 describes the ideas and beliefs that formed the
background to the actual formation of the United States. Chapter 3 focuses
specifically on the writing and ratification of that polity’s founding document,
the United States Constitution. Chapter 4 identifies key moments of constitu-
tional crisis when there were major reconsiderations of the American polity’s
constitutional underpinning.
In order to claim that speech and choice are the building blocks of a polity, that
polity must allow persons to speak freely, to have a say in how the laws are made
and to feel secure that those laws will be obeyed. A polity characterized by free
speech, rule of law, and collective decision making is called a republic. The
American Republic, and all modern ones, operate on the basis of representation.
The citizenry plays a minor role, if any, in governing. For the most part its role is
restricted to electing representatives who do the actual work of governing.
Because the representatives are popularly elected the United States is a represen-
tative, democratic republic.

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6 Introduction

American Political Development

Political Memory
Martin Luther King gave a speech in the present in an effort to influence the
future and yet so much of it focuses on the past. It refers back to leaders,
documents, and songs from long ago – Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence,
the framers of the Constitution, a spiritual sung by slaves. This was no accident.
King knew that the best way to impress all the audiences for his speech – the
crowd on the Mall, the congressmen whose votes he was trying to garner,
tomorrow’s newspaper readers, the next generation of children reading history
textbooks– was to link his thoughts and aspirations to great leaders, ideas, and
cultural symbols from the past.
As the great American writer William Faulkner observed, “the past is not dead,
it is not even past.” It shapes our ideas, attitudes, and sentiments endowing the
present with meaning. Stories from the past pervade our imaginations. They
provide vivid examples of what to do and what not to do. They help to define
our sense of who we are, whom we love, and whom we hate. They supply our
minds with a cast of heroes to emulate. Faced with a tough decision, a president
or even an ordinary person might not only consider the present facts but also
look for moral and intellectual guidance by asking “What would Lincoln have
done? What would Martin Luther King have done?”
The pull of the past is demonstrated by the frequency with which historical
analogies find their way into political debate. People often make use of such
analogies to reason through a problem and to defend their position. Those who
favored Obama’s stimulus package chose a favorable historical case to compare it
to – FDR’s New Deal. Those who opposed the War in Iraq often likened it to an
unsuccessful prior war – Vietnam. Those who favored it claimed that a failure to
attack Iraq would do to the Middle East what the appeasement of Hitler at
Munich did to Europe. The manner in which the past influences our thoughts,
feelings, and imagination this text calls political memory. MLK crafted his words
to create the strongest possible connection between his ideas and sentiments and
those that serve as the wellsprings of American political memory.

Enduring Principles
This book will show that the political memory of Americans is largely devoted to
political principles that were established early in our history and that endure.
Those principles are so deeply embedded in American political understanding
and so central to its political life that the term enduring principles forms half of
this book’s subtitle. These foundational principles stem from three distinct

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American Political Development 7

sources. The commitment to natural rights and limited government stems from
the Classic Liberal political philosophers of the seventeenth century. The com-
mitment to local self-government and community solidarity stems from Puritan-
ism and the practical experience of local self-government in the New England
townships. The commitment to democracy and equality is rooted in the experi-
ence of the American Revolution and the works of such apostles of majority rule
as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. For simplicity sake, the book refers to
these three political strands as Classic Liberalism, Communitarianism, and Egali-
tarian Democracy. The commonalities and tensions between them are discussed
in Chapter 2, and the actual political conflicts that those tensions give rise to are
highlighted in Chapter 4 and reemerge continually in later chapters.
In the words of leading political scientists Stephen Skowronek and Karen
Orren, “because a polity in all its different parts is contructed historically, over
time, the nature and prospects of any single part will be best understood within
the long course of political formation.” They term this approach to studying
politics, political development. This text takes a political development approach.
It shows how the political building blocks discussed in the previous section –
speech, leadership, conflict, institutions – have operated over time to shape current
American politics and government. How the key political principles mentioned
above have faced challenge, how and to what extent they have endured.
As critical as political memory is to understanding present politics, the American
Political Development (APD) approach also demonstrates two other crucial avenues
by which the past affects the present – path dependency and critical choices.
Like individuals, political institutions are also heavily influenced by the past.
Once a particular way of doing things has been set in motion, considerable inertia
develops that encourages the continuation of that course. Political scientists call
this phenomenon path dependency. A striking everyday example of path depend-
ency is typewriting. When inventor C. L. Sholes built the first commercial
typewriter prototype in 1868, the keys were arranged alphabetically in two rows.
But the metal arms attached to the keys would jam if two letters near each other
were typed in succession. So, Sholes rearranged the keys to make sure that the
most common letter pairs such as “TH” were not too near each other. The new
keyboard arrangement was nicknamed QWERTY after the six letters that form the
upper left-hand row of the keyboard. QWERTY’s original rationale has disap-
peared because keyboards now send their messages electronically. Many typing
students find it very hard to master. Despite its shortcomings, QWERTY remains
the universal typing keyboard arrangement simply because it is already so widely
used and so many people have already taken pains to master it. Future typists
might benefit from a change, but they do not buy keyboards; current typists do.
Many political institutions and practices are just like QWERTY. Although their
original purposes no longer exist, people are used to them and the costs of
starting afresh are just too high.

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8 Introduction

There are countless examples of path dependence in American politics. Perhaps

the single most important example is the way in which the United States is carved
up into individual states. State boundary lines exist for all sorts of peculiar
historical reasons. On the East Coast, they represent, for the most part, the grants
given by Britain to specific individuals and groups to establish colonies. On the
Pacific Coast and in the Southwest, they represent the boundaries of colonies
obtained from Spain. In the Great Plains, they often represent little more than the
preference of surveyors for drawing squares and rectangles. One can imagine
many good reasons for adjusting state boundaries to accommodate practical
realities. Why should Kansas City be split between Kansas and Missouri? The
suburbs of northern New Jersey and southwestern Connecticut are dominated
culturally and to a large measure economically by New York City and yet they
remain part of other states. There have been very few changes in state boundaries
over the entire course of American history.
This bias in favor of the status quo is not simply because people are creatures
of habit, though indeed they are. It is also because, as a rule, those who benefit
from an existing policy will fight harder to keep the policy in place than those
who might benefit from a change will fight to alter it. Beneficiaries of existing
policies know what they have and what they stand to lose if policies change.
Potential beneficiaries can only estimate the benefits that a policy change might
bring them. Therefore, politically speaking, fear of loss is a more powerful
motivator than hope of gain.

Critical Choices
By showing how the odds favor the status quo, the developmental approach
encourages a greater appreciation of what it takes to beat the odds. As passage
of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act so forcefully
demonstrate, the powerful inertial biases of American politics are sometimes
overcome. A key theme of this book is how and why Americans have made
critical choices that shifted America’s political path. How and why did the
antipathy to political parties yield to the establishment of a two party political
system? How and why did a strictly limited federal government mushroom
into an elaborate administrative state? How and why were voting rights for
African Americans and women finally granted after having been denied for
so long?
Those critical choices that reshaped the constitutional underpinnings of the
Ameican polity the text refers to as conservative revolutions (see Chapter 4).
Calling them conservative revolutions is a reminder that such is the power of path
dependency that even when when critical change does occur, those changes are
decisively shaped by past events.

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The Plan of This Book 9

In sum, this text bases its discussion of American politics on several key
building blocks: the interplay of enduring principles and critical choices; the role
of political memory and path dependency, the influence of political speech, the
role of political leaders, the dynamics of political competition, and the function-
ing of political institutions.

The Plan of This Book

This book is divided into four parts. The first, “Formative Experiences,” contains
Chapters 2, 3, and 4, which focus respectively on political culture, constitu-
tional design, and critical episodes in American political development. Chapter 2
examines the formation and meaning of the core political beliefs that
Americans profess. It shows how those beliefs coalesce to form what Tocque-
ville called “habits of the heart,” an enduring political culture shaping the
political opinions and actions of Americans. Chapter 3 looks at the Consti-
tution: the political debate its creation provoked, the conflicts between rights
and democracy that it settled, and those that it left unsettled. It explains why it
is so important that the American government was erected on the basis of an
original and carefully designed blueprint and how that conscious plan both
reflects American political culture and has helped to shape it. Chapter 4 focuses
on the major points of transition that have occurred since the constitutional
founding.
Part II, “Pivotal Relationships,” looks at how the federal government engages
with the states and with the economy. The Constitution does not establish fixed
boundaries between national and state governmental power, nor does it clearly
define the limits of government regulation of private property. The disputes
provoked by these uncertain boundaries have proven to be among the most hotly
contested controversies in all of American political life and have given it much of
its distinctive style and substance. As we shall see, those who fight for greater
national power as well as those who resist either in the name of states rights or
property rights all invoke the principles of rights and democracy to support
their side.
The four chapters that form Part III, “Governing Institutions,” each examine
one of the three branches of national government – the Congress, the presidency,
and the federal judiciary – enumerated in the Constitution, as well as the
bureaucracy, which developed, in large measure, outside of formal constitutional
arrangements. These chapters describe how those institutions operate now and
how they have changed over time. The great debates over the structure and
purposes of these institutions demonstrate how political arguments and political
decisions shape and alter the “nuts and bolts” of government.

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10 Introduction

Part IV concentrates on the various phenomena that comprise American

political life and the interrelationships among them. It begins with an analysis
of contemporary public opinion describing how the opinions that Americans hold
both reflect enduring aspects of American political culture and display some
disturbing deviations from it. In a representative democracy the primary means
for translating opinion into meaningful political participation comes through the
act of voting. The next two chapters examine voting, first by looking at the most
powerful means for galvanizing and organizing voting behavior, the political
party, and then by looking at the impact of political campaigns and of the rules
governing elections. The chapter on campaigns and elections includes a detailed
account of the 2016 presidential campaign. Although elections are central to
the operation of a democratic republic, they are not the sole focal point of
meaningful political activity. Chapter 14 examines other critical forms of polit-
ical behavior: movements, lobbies, and voluntary associations. All of these
political actors have been discussed extensively earlier in the book, but always
in supporting roles. It would be impossible to have a full-fledged discussion of
any of the topics in Parts I through III without paying due attention to their
mighty influence. Here they gain center stage. The spotlight is on their develop-
ment and dynamics and how they have embodied and exemplified key questions
of liberty, community, and democracy. The book ends with some reflections on
several of the major concepts and principles that permeate the text.
Each chapter begins within an overview of its key themes. A vignette follows
that evokes one or more of those themes. Then the chapter provides a contempor-
ary portait of how the chapter’s subject actually functions today. After, the chapter
traces the political development of that subject to demonstrate the debt that current
reality owes to enduring principles and to persistent paths and critical choices that
have been forged over time. It provides a concluding statement, and ends with a
summary of the most important points the chapter has made.

American Politics and Government: Policies and Programs

There is no better guide to what Americans want and expect from government
than the Constitution’s Preamble:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish
Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general
Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and
establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The following is a brief introductory sketch of programs and policies that have
been put in place to implement these high-minded but vague objectives and some
of the most serious current controversies surrounding them.

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American Politics and Government: Policies and Programs 11

“Form a More Perfect Union”

At present, the United States is the only major nation that refers to itself as a
“union.” The US was founded as a union of states and, to this day, the individual
states have many of the powers that in other countries belong exclusively to the
central government. They levy taxes, educate college students, build and main-
tain roads, and have their own law codes. Most crimes are tried in state criminal
courts. Most lawsuits are brought in state civil courts. Those states with capital
punishment laws exercise a legal power to kill. States perform a multitude of
important regulatory functions. They regulate insurance companies, hospitals,
and real estate transactions. All states issue drivers licenses. States also require
licenses to engage in a wide variety of professions and businesses. In North
Carolina, for example, one must obtain a license in order to engage in any one
of more than one hundred and fify occupations including school teaching,
practicing law, parachute rigging, embalming, and acting as an agent for a
professional athlete.
Each state has its own constitution, which differ greatly from one another. For
example, unlike the federal government and forty-nine other states, Nebraska’s
legislature is not bicameral; it consists solely of one legislative chamber. The
Louisiana legal code is derived from France’s Code Napoleon, not from British
Common Law that serves as the basis for the law codes of all the other states. The
complex relationship between the states and the national government is called
federalism (see Chapter 5). The US is not the only federal nation. Germany, India,
and Canada are among the other nations that grant significant powers to their
states or provinces.
The original reason for seeking to establish a more perfect union was the
weakness of the central government formed by the Articles of Confederation
(see Chapter 2). The current national government is at least as strong as those of
other nations. It commands the largest and strongest military and spends the
most money on defense of any country in the world. Some of its activities – such
as running the military, the diplomatic corps, the post office, and the national
parks, forests, and public lands, and providing old-age pensions – it does entirely
on its own. But many others – providing healthcare and income subsidies to the
poor, training workers, regulating air and water pollution, aiding the handi-
capped and establishing student achievement standards – it does in partnership
with state and local governments. Sometimes it funds these policy partnerships
through what are called federal grants in aid (see Chapter 5). Sometimes it simply
requires the states and localities to do them with their own money through what
are called mandates (see Chapter 5).
There is no clear-cut distinction between which powers belong to the states
and which to the federal government. This blurriness gives a distinctive cast to
American political debate. Here, political conflict occurs not only over what

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12 Introduction

government should do, but who should do it. For example, the arguments over
abortion, gay marriage, and gun control include both the question of what should
be done about them and also whether the states or the federal government should
control the matter. Before the passage of the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) in
2002, the federal government had restricted its intervention in K-12 education to
enforcing school desegregation and providing various forms of aid to poor school
districts. NCLB made it a condition of federal aid that every state establish
student achievement standards and test students to ensure that they were meet-
ing those standards. Many parents, teachers, and concerned citizens considered
NCLB to be an unwarranted intrusion of the federal government into a matter
that ought to remain the exclusive province of the states and localities. In the
face of this mass of protest, in 2015 Congress replaced NCLB with the Every
Student Succeeds Act, which significantly loosened the national standards, greatly
reducing the intrusiveness of the national government in educational matters.
Perfecting the Union pertains not only to harmonizing national and state
governments but also to determining which persons can legitimately claim to
be a part of it. Other nations traditionally defined their citizenry on the basis of
blood. A Frenchman was a Frenchman because he was descended from French-
men. The US, being a nation formed by immigrants, did not adopt that approach.
Citizenship has been open both to those born here and those who take an oath of
allegiance to the United States. Becoming an American means committing one’s
self to the set of principles that define the American creed as that creed is
expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution
and the Bill of Rights.

Controversy: Open versus Restricted Immigration

Not everyone has the opportunity to become a US citizen. Current law restricts the
number of aliens who can establish residency in the United States and thus become
eligible for citizenship. To escape poverty and political oppression, millions of
foreigners, most of them from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America, enter
the country illegally. The Pew Research Center has estimated that as of 2014 there
were 11,700,000 illegal aliens in the United States (www.pewresearch.org/fact-
tank/2016/09/20/measuring-illegal-immigration-how-pew-research-center-
counts-unauthorized-immigrants-in-the-u-s/). The attitude of American citizens
toward them is ambivalent. They perform work that American citizens are
unwilling to perform – slaughtering cows and hogs, harvesting crops, maintain-
ing lawns – but they also put a great strain on schools, housing, police, hospitals,
and welfare systems.
The arguments in favor of exerting tighter control of illegal immigration and
in favor of loosening such control are based on different conceptions of how best
to perfect the Union. Neither denies that the essence of American citizenship is a

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American Politics and Government: Policies and Programs 13

commitment to the American creed. But restrictionists insist that the Union can
only continue to flourish if the rate of immigration does not exceed the capacity
of government and society to successfully absorb and assimilate the newcomers.
Anti-restrictions maintain that any serious attempt to keep people out violates
the deepest principles of liberty and equality that underlie the Union and thus
renders the Union all the more imperfect. As we shall see in Chapter 13, the
immigration issue played a big role in the 2016 presidential campaign.

“Insure Domestic Tranquility”

Unlike other countries, the United States has no national police force. The
ordinary tasks of “insuring domestic tranquility,” such as preventing and solving
crimes, regulating traffic, and controlling crowds, are performed by state and
local police. States also have their own codes of criminal law covering most
ordinary crimes such as burglarly, arson, rape, murder, and assault, and their own
courts for enforcing those codes. In 1878, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus
Act, which is still in effect. Posse Comitatus means “power of the county.” It forbids
the mililtary from conducting domestic law enforcement except for constitution-
ally explicit or congressionally mandated exceptions. The Insurrection Act of
1807 clarifies the authority of the federal government to use the military to
suppress domestic insurrections, as Lincoln did in the South’s secession in the Civil
War. In the 1950s and 1960s federal troops were used to overcome the refusal of
Southern governors to integrate schools as required by decisions of the Supreme
Court, and were sent in to control some of the riots that had broken out in the
African American neighborhoods of major American cities.
The federal government does perform certain specific law enforcement func-
tions that are beyond the capacity of state and local police. The Federal Bureau of
Investigation was formed to cope with crimes that crossed state lines, such as
kidnapping, and subsequently expanded the scope of its activities to include the
prosecution of organized crime. The Secret Service guards the safety of the
president, the vice president, their families, presidential candidates, and visiting
world leaders. It also protects the money supply by prosecuting counterfeiting of
US currency and bonds. The Coast Guard was granted an exception by the
Congress to enable it to fight drug trafficking. But the targeted nature of these
assignments attest to how powerful the resistance of Americans is to allowing the
federal government to perform ordinary police functions.
Since 9/11, efforts to prevent terror attacks has served to greatly increase
federal law enforcement responsibilities. This expansion is signified by the
creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the first new cabinet
level department since the Department of Veterans Affairs was established in
1989. Both the Secret Service and the Coast Guard have been transferred to DHS.
It also houses the newly created Transportation Security Administration created

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14 Introduction

to protect the nation’s airports, railroads and other transportation networks, the
Customs Service, the Immigration Service, and various other bureaus and parts of
other agencies concerned with domestic preparedness. Although not part of DHS,
the FBI has greatly expanded its antiterror efforts.

Controversy: “Insure Domestic Tranquility” versus Civil Liberties

The most serious current controversy about insuring domestic tranquility con-
cerns the clash between protecting citizens against terror attack and protecting
the full range of individual rights the Constitution guarantees. Normally a search
warrant is required in order for law enforcement to place a tap on a telephone or
otherwise listen in on what would otherwise be private communication. In order
to obtain information about terror attack planning President George W. Bush
ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor international telephone
calls and international email of persons suspected of terrorist ties without first
obtaining a search warrant. When news of this practice was leaked to the New
York Times, many critics claimed that it was a violation of one’s right to
communicate in private. The administration stressed that the NSA did not
eavesdrop on the actual phone conversations or read emails but rather searched
for patterns of phone numbers and emails addresses to see who was talking to
whom. This did not reassure critics who viewed the compiling of any data about
interpersonal telecommunications as a violation of civil liberties. Despite the
great outrage expressed, Congress confirmed the president’s authority to order
these forms of surveillance when it amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveil-
lance Act in 2008.

“Provide for the Common Defense”

The goal of “providing for the common defense” is obvious. Americans want to
be safe from foreign threat. But what does “defense” mean? As any football fan
knows, offense and defense are inseparable. The other team cannot score if your
team has the ball. The same is true for war. The national defense does not consist
only of fending off enemy attack. In many cases the best defense consists of
keeping one’s enemies on the defensive by strengthening one’s own offensive
capabilities. The United States military is trained and equipped to attack others as
well as to defend against attack.
Modern war is horrifically destructive. It is a last resort for protecting national
security. Therefore a critical aspect of providing for the common defense involves
diminishing the likelihood of war through the conduct of diplomacy. Diplomatic
time and effort is devoted to building alliances with other friendly nations and
trying to find common ground even with potential enemies via negotiation. The
military aspect of providing for the common defense is primarily the responsibility

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American Politics and Government: Policies and Programs 15

of the Department of Defense and the armed services that it supervises. The
diplomatic aspect is primarily the province of the Department of State. These
duties are so vital to the safety of the nation that the Secretaries of Defense and
State, along with the Secretary of the Treasury, are, after the president, the most
powerful and prestigious positions in the executive branch.
Until the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, the United States was one of two
world superpowers and was engaged in a costly and dangerous rivalry with the
other superpower, the Soviet Union. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US
has become the world’s sole superpower. Its military strength dwarfs that of any
other nation. It spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined.
Because it has such a voracious appetite for supplies and technology, it
has spawned huge industries devoted to producing weapons, transport, commu-
nications systems, and other high-tech equipment for it. In order to maintain its
technological edge over other nations, the military invests heavily in scientific
and engineering research, much of which is done by universities who, in
turn, have become heavily dependent upon the funds they receive from the
Defense Department to conduct such studies. Indeed the US spends more on
defense research and development than any other nation spends for all its
military needs. President Dwight David Eisenhower coined the term “military
industrial complex” to refer to this complex network of government, industry,
and higher education.
Its size and strength enables the United States to operate on a global basis. No
other nation has the wherewithal to do so. Even at the height of the Iraq War,
when 160,000 soldiers were fighting in that country and another 12,000 were
fighting in Afghanistan, the US maintained what are called combatant com-
mands prepared to wage war almost anywhere in the world. These include:
European Command, Pacific Command, and Southern Command, among others.
Each command has a well-staffed headquarters and large numbers of troops, with
others available to be mobilized in time of war.

Controversy: Superpower or Super Bully?

The most serious controversy involving “the common defense” stems from the
United States’ superpower status and global reach. Does this overwhelming
power really make the country safer or does such strength serve as an almost
irresistible temptation to throw its weight around? In recent decades the US has
been engaged militarily in places such as Kosovo, Somalia, and Libya where the
relationship between the fighting it was engaged in and US national security was
tenuous at best.
The War on Terror launched by the Bush administration committed the US to
long, costly, and bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nations whom the US
considers to be allies either opposed these efforts or made only very small troop

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16 Introduction

commitments. Some argue that the US should not be so willing to act on its own.
It should work more closely with its allies because that is the best way to
maintain peace and the best way to ensure that the burden of fighting is more
equally shared should war become unavoidable. Others contend that those allies
have become so used to having the US fight their battles for them that they are no
longer willing or able to bear their fair share of the load and that, therefore, the
US has no choice but to take on the primary responsibility of protecting its
national security, and theirs.

“Promote the General Welfare”

The United States took a very different approach to providing for the general
welfare than did the nations of Western Europe. It defined “welfare” to mean
restricting the intrusion of government rather than providing help to people. This
effort to reign in government power is called limited government. It assumes that
unless the constitution specifically grants government the right to engage in a
specific activity, the government is not permitted to do so. Limiting government
to only those constitutionally specified activities is called enumerated powers.
Article I of the Constitution restricts the legislative power of government to only
those specific powers enumerated in Article Section 8. Throughout most of its
history the national government did not provide student loans, unemployment
benefits, aid to the disabled, old-age pensions, medical care for the poor, or any
of the other social service programs it now offers.
In the twentieth century American government has greatly expanded its
powers beyond those enumerated in the Constitution. As a result, differences
between American welfare policy and those of Western Europe have diminished
considerably. The major remaining differences relate not to the total amount of
welfare aid – the US is now in line with most advanced countries in total welfare
funds expended – but rather how and for what purposes welfare aid is provided.
The US is much more inclined to target specific categories of recipients – the
elderly, the disabled, children, and unwed mothers. Whereas many rich countries
will provide income to any poor person, in the US a guaranteed income is only
accorded to those over 65 and welfare payments only go to poor single parent
families, and for a maximum of only five years. In many European countries,
college tuition is free or very low. The US national government does not attempt
to control college tuition but subsidizes low-income college students and pro-
vides low-interest loans to middle class ones. Nor does the US provide free
universal day care and preschool as so many of its counterparts do. Rather it
funds preschool programs for the poor.
Rather than make direct payments for many welfare purposes, the US prefers to
make use of the Federal Tax Code for philanthropic purposes. Gifts to charity are
tax deductible. A very sizeable part of funds spent on medical care, scholarship aid,

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American Politics and Government: Policies and Programs 17

mental health services, and many other welfare programs comes from charitable
donations. Low-income working people receive tax credits to offset their income
tax obligations. If those credits exceed the taxes owed, they keep the difference.
The federal government also provides for the general welfare by regulating the
behavior of the private sector. Federal agencies such as the Environmental
Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Occupational Safety
and Health Administration, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department,
and the Consumer Product Safety Commission have been established to enforce a
variety of regulatory laws passed by Congress. The missions of these various
regulatory bodies include, among others: enforcing laws to limit the air, water,
and other forms of pollution emitted by factories, power plants, and automobiles;
guaranteeing the safety of food, drugs, toys, and workplaces; and combating
race, gender, and other forms of discrimination.
The federal government also intensively regulates various aspects of the
economy. It does this in two different ways. It oversees the behavior of specific
sectors such as banking and stock and bond trading to try to make sure that the
firms engaged in those activities provide accurate information to customers and
do not engage in excessively risky activities. It also regulates the overall func-
tioning of the economy by controlling the money supply and setting the interest
rates the government charges for the sale of government bonds.
Other rich nations engage in these same regulatory activities. But they also
take aggressive actions to control labor markets and the conditions of employ-
ment. They intervene to set wages for the employees of certain industries,
establish a mandatory number of vacation days, and restrict the ability of
employers to fire workers. The US restricts itself to establishing a minimum wage
that, in practice, only affects the lowest-paid workers. Otherwise companies are
free to pay what they wish, hire and fire whom they want, and set whatever
vacation policies they desire as long as they do not discriminate among workers
on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, or age.

Controversy: Welfare versus Self-reliance

What government provides for individuals and businesses they need not provide
for themselves. Ever since the creation of old-age pensions in the 1930s, every
major proposal for greater government welfare aid has aroused opposition on the
grounds that it diminishes the self-reliance and sense of personal responsibility
of those receiving the aid. This criticism is at the heart of the controversy that
arose from the bailouts of certain banks, investment houses, insurance firms, and
automobile companies that took place during the financial collapse and eco-
nomic recession of late 2008 and early 2009. Opponents argued that by bailing
out those who made excessively risky loans, insurance contracts, and invest-
ments the government was signaling that it would do so again in the future, thus

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18 Introduction

relieving the perpetrators of these risky practices of the need to act more
prudently and responsibly. Likewise, the bailout of Chrysler and General Motors
signaled that if a company employs a large enough number of workers, dealers,
and suppliers, the government will not let it fail even if it is has failed the market
test of supply and demand. Supporters of bailouts do not deny that they give the
wrong message to firms; rather they argue that if major banks, insurance
companies, and investment houses fail, the stock and bond markets will tumble,
credit will disappear, and a wave of home foreclosures will occur. Furthermore,
the auto industry is so central to the economy that the failure of the first and third
largest auto companies would set off a similar wave of unemployment. So, even
if bailouts risk encouraging irresponsibility, they are necessary, and in this
instance were the lesser of two evils.

“Secure the Blessings of Liberty”

The American Constitution is made up of seven separate articles and twenty-seven
differerent amendments. But when Americans are asked what’s in the Constitution
they rarely mention either the articles or the last seventeen amendments. For the
average American the Constitution is the Bill of Rights – the rights to free speech,
religion, gun ownership, property, and other liberties granted to persons and to the
states in the first ten amendments. Americans have always prided themselves on
being a liberty-loving people and they still do. A great theme of American political
development is that of the expansion of rights to include full civil and political
rights to African Americans and women. Although the Constitution contains no
right to old-age pensions, social security has become such an accepted part of
American life that it has more or less risen to the status of a right. In recent years,
laws have been passed to greatly increase the rights enjoyed by the physically and
mentally disabled. The Supreme Court has also declared that the Constitution
ensures that every American enjoys a right to privacy.

Controversy: A Right to Healthcare?

In our discussions of immigration and electronic surveillance we have already
commented on the problems that arise when rights clash. Another great source of
controversy arises from efforts to further expand rights. The current controversy
over heathcare reveals differences of opinion about how much of it Americans
should have by right. Currently most Americans have health insurance. It is either
a benefit they receive from their employer, tax free, or something they purchase
for themselves. But many employers do not provide health insurance. Therefore
many Americans are uninsured either because they cannot afford to buy it or
they are young and healthy enough that they would rather go without it.

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American Politics and Government: Policies and Programs 19

Even if one agrees that healthcare is a right of all Americans what does that right
actually entitle one to? Breakthroughs in modern medicine have greatly expanded
the possible meanings of healthcare. Laser surgery enables tennis players with knee
problems to be back on the court in a few weeks. Viagra extends the active sex life
of men into their old age. Fertility treatment enables women to get pregnant later
in life. Botox eliminates wrinkles. Does everyone have a right to all these forms of
healthcare? Some argue that the right to healthcare is limited to “no frills” items
like checkups and catastrophic illness or trauma. Others argue that virtually any
form of physical or mental correction or enhancement should be available to all
Americans regardless of income, especially since the government provides much of
the funding that goes into the discovery and development of the chemicals and
techniques that make such enhancements possible.

“Establish Justice”
We save “Establish Justice” for last because for two of the three dominant schools
of contemporary American political thinking it is very closely tied to goals we
have already discussed. Libertarians would argue that establishing justice means
the same thing as securing the blessings of liberty. They would consider justice
to mean what the Declaration of Independence posits as the right to “pursue
happiness.” Justice is not something that government grants; rather, it is the
opportunity to make the best of things on one’s own, free of government
interference. Liberals would link the establishment of justice to providing for
the general welfare. They consider that a society is just only if it assists those who
have not had a fair chance to pursue happiness because they are poor, female, or
members of racial, religious, or ethnic minorities. They demand that government
do more than refrain from interfering in the race of life. They want it to act
affirmatively to ensure that all handicaps have been removed so that the race is
run fairly. Only conservatives view the establishment of justice as a distinct aim
of politics. Conservatives are often lumped together with libertarians because
they too oppose government policies aimed at redistributing wealth and subsid-
izing the poor. Both fear that such policies undermine self-reliance and personal
responsibility. But unlike libertarians, conservatives seek to use government to
establish justice by upholding moral virtue and combating moral decay.

Controversy: Permit, Subidize, or Ban Abortion

These differing views of justice crystallize in the debate over abortion. Libertar-
ians support unfettered access to abortion, believing that women should have the
freedom to control what is done to their bodies. They oppose the attempts by
conservatives to moralize the issue. Most liberals also oppose restrictions on
abortion but as a matter of justice they also insist that the government subsidize

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20 Introduction

abortions for those too poor to afford them. Many conservatives consider abor-
tion to be immoral and therefore they want government to ban it or at least
establish restrictive conditions to control it, including requiring pregnant minors
to discuss the matter with their parents and with the prospective father.

The Institutions of Government

Afer setting out the aims of American government in the Preamble, the
Constitution proceeds to establish specific institutions designed to carry out those
aims. The Constitution creates three branches of government: the executive,
headed by the president (see Chapter 8), the legislative, comprised of two separate
branches of Congress – the House of Representatives and the Senate (see
Chapter 7) – and the judicial, comprised of a system of federal courts presided
over by the Supreme Court (see Chapter 9).
Each of these branches has its own duties, and this allocation of responsi-
bilities is known as the separation of powers. Each branch is also granted
specific means for intruding into the workings of the others. This system of
intrusions is referred to as checks and balances. Thus, the president has the
power to veto bills passed by Congress. The House of Representatives can
impeach the president and the Senate may then vote to remove him from office.
The Senate must confirm certain presidential appointments, most especially
appointments to the federal courts and to the president’s cabinet. Although
the Constitution does not explicitly provide for it, the Supreme Court has
acquired the power to declare acts of Congress and actions of the president
unconstitutional.
The following is a brief sketch of each of the three branches of the federal
government. The sketches display both continuity and change. They depict
critical ways in which the three branches adhere to the constitutional blueprint.
They also describe departures from that blueprint and raise the question of
whether or not those departures violate the spirit of checks and balances.

Congress
Article I grants Congress the exclusive power to legislate. All the laws of the
United States must pass both houses of Congress – the House of Representatives
and the Senate. If the president vetoes a bill approved by Congress, both houses
must reapprove the measure by a two-thirds vote for it to become law. All bills
having to do with raising revenue must first pass the House of Representatives
before being eligible for consideration by the Senate. The Senate reviews all
cabinet, court, and diplomatic appointments made by the president and must
consent to them.

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The Institutions of Government 21

Congresspersons also engage in many activities not discussed in the Consti-

tution. They provide diverse services to their constituents including help with
immigration problems and with difficulties in obtaining veterans, social security,
and other forms of benefits that constituents believe they qualify for. Congress
also engages in extensive oversight of executive agencies. It holds hearings and
calls executive officials to testify and to defend their actions. Although the
Constitution does not specifically grant such powers to Congress, they may well
be defended as constituting important checks on the executive, preventing it
from dealing arbitrarily or unfairly with citizens or evading the letter or the spirit
of laws passed by Congress. Congress’s capacity to adequately check executive
excess is more fully discussed in Chapter 7.

The President
Congress legislates, but it no longer serves as the only or even perhaps the most
important initiator of legislative proposals. The role of chief legislator has passed
to the president. He often sets the legislative agenda and uses his enormous
political influence to press for passage of legislation he favors and to fight
against legislation he opposes.
This shift in the nature of legislative leadership is but one aspect of a broad
increase in the expansion of the president’s political importance. The president
commands the bulk of the attention that the media pays to national political
affairs. His speeches are televised. His travels and activities are reported on in
minute detail. Presidential elections are by far the most important and celebrated
of all national political events. The Constitution makes the president commander
in chief of the armed forces, but in addition to acquiring the power of legislator in
chief he has now also become political celebrity in chief. Only the most popular
entertainers and athletes can claim a similar level of fame.
Celebrity poses both opportunities and problems for the president. It enables
him to command public attention more or less at will and thus enables him to
communicate more successfully with the citizenry than anyone else. But it also
greatly increases the public’s expectations of what he can accomplish. If the
economy declines, the public is ready to blame him even though he may not
necessarily be in a position to do anything about it. The impact of this expansion
of the president’s role on the system of checks and balances will be discussed
more fully in Chapter 8.

The Supreme Court

Article III of the Constitution creates a federal court system, culminating in a
Supreme Court, that is responsible for “all cases arising under the Constitution.”
The federal courts do indeed hear and decide cases involving disputes between

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22 Introduction

states, disputes that take place at sea, and a host of other questions that are
clearly beyond the capacity of any state court to deal with. But the Supreme Court
in particular has also taken on two enormous responsibilities that the Constitution
does not specifically give it. It decides whether acts of Congress and of the
president are constitutional or not. During the Bush administration the Court
overruled actions of both the president and Congress regarding the War on Terror.
The Supreme Court has also taken on the power to declare the existence of
rights not enumerated in the Bill of Rights. For example, in declaring unconsti-
tutional a Connecticut law that made it a crime to sell or use contraception
because the law violated the right to privacy, it admitted that the Constitution
mentions no such right. Rather, it argued, the spirit of a right to privacy pervades
the document as a whole. Defenders of these rulings view them as critical both to
checking congressional and presidential excess and protecting the people’s liber-
ties. Critics charge that these decisions undermine the Constitution by allowing
the Court to usurp legislative and executive authority as well as to short-circuit
the constitutional amendment process by rewriting the Constitution itself. This
controversy over the Court’s role in the checks and balances system will be taken
up more fully in Chapter 9

A Request
As the reader now proceeds to the fuller account of American government and
politics that this chapter has introduced, we urge that in addition to trying to
understand how politics works, the reader also try to appreciate politics. Because
no person is an island, politics is inescapable. We must live with the collective
decisions made in our midst whether we choose to participate in them or not.
Inescapable yes, tedious no. Politics combines the suspense of sports with the
colorful array of characters found in great literature. Savor its richness, its
dramatic intensity, and its capacity to surprise.

CHAPTER SUMMARY
* Key building blocks of American politics include: the influence of political
speech, the role of political leaders, the dynamics of political competition, and
the functioning of political institutions.
* The American polity is best understood to be a democratic republic.
* The United States is a federal union in which both the states and the national
government exercise considerable powers.

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Suggested Readings 23

* The American Constitution prescribes limited government based on enumer-

ated powers and seeks to create a system of checks and balances between the
different branches of government.
* American political development is an approach to the study of politics and
government that proceeds historically in order to illuminate how the past
affects the present and future.
* The past strongly influences the present because of how political institutions
work and how individuals think about politics and government. Three key
aspects of political development are: political memory, path dependency, and
critical choices.
* Path dependency means that once a way of doing things has been set in motion
a considerable inertia develops that encourages the continuation of that course.
* Americans have made critical choices that shifted America’s political path.
* The battle over immigration is not one between right and wrong but between
different conceptions of rights – the right to enter a free society versus the right
of those already there to protect their quality of life by defining the terms and
conditions of entry.
* Unlike most other countries, the United States has no national police force.
The ordinary tasks of “insuring domestic tranquility” such as preventing and
solving crimes, regulating traffic, and controlling crowds are performed by
state and local police.
* With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has become the world’s sole
superpower. Its military strength dwarfs that of any other nation.
* Historically, the United States took a very different approach to providing for
the general welfare than did other advanced republican democracies, but those
differences have diminished considerably in recent decades.
* A great theme of American political development is that of the expansion of
rights to include full civil and political rights to African Americans and women.
In recent years laws have been passed to greatly increase the rights enjoyed by
the physically and mentally disabled.
* A key difference between libertarians, liberals, and conservatives regards their
views of justice.

SUGGESTED READINGS
Bryce, James. The American Commonwealth. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1996.
Chesterton, G. K. What I Saw in America. New York: Dodd Mead, 1923.
Crenson, Matthew A., Ginsberg, Benjamin. Downsizing Democracy: How America Side-
lined its Citizens and Privatized its Public, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2002.
Croly, Herbert. Progressive Democracy. New York: Transaction, 1998.
Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers, ed. Charles
Kesler. New York: Mentor Books, 1999.

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24 Introduction

Hartz, Louis. The Liberal Tradition in America, 2nd edn. New York: Harvest Books, 1991.
Heclo, Hugh. On Thinking Institutionally, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers 2008.
Lowi, Theodore. The End of Liberalism, 2nd edn. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979.
McWilliams, Wilson Carey. The Idea of Fraternity in America. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1973.
Morone, James. Democratic Wish: Democratic Participation and the Limits of American
Government, rev. edn. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
Orren, Karen, and Stephen Skowronek. The Search for American Political Development.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Pierson, Paul. Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2004.
Putnam, Robert Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Schuck, Peter H., and Wilson, James Q. Understanding America: The Anatomy of an
Exceptional Nation. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006.
Smith, Rogers M. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in the United States.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.
Storing, Herbert, ed. The Complete Anti-Federalist. University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America, ed. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop.
University of Chicago Press, 2000.

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Part I
Formative Experiences

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