Review session slides

Fine. Y'all have talked me into it.

Here are the slides from yesterday's review session.

Allow me to reiterate, though. The slides are merely a useful review of some important concepts. They are not an exhaustive guide of everything you will need to know for the test, and working through the slides is not a substitute for reading and studying.

Exam 2

As a reminder, this Friday's exam will cover chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9. That's Congress, the presidency, the bureaucracy, and the judiciary.

PLEASE do your reading.

Lecture 17 and 18 Slides

Here are the slides for the second and third Supreme Court lectures as well as the infamous political language lecture.

Lecture 17
Lecture 18

Lecture 11 (political language)

Thinking about judicial power

Though judicial review is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, it is clear that the most of the Founders had the notion that the federal courts would take some role in keeping Congress within its constitutional boundaries. The classic statement of this perspective is Hamilton's Federalist 78.

Here, Hamilton makes the case that judicial review is a natural extension of courts' tradiutional powers and that judicial independence is "peculiarly important" for preserving constitutional limits on government power. It is fair to say that Hamilton's views on the matter are shared by a very large majority of legal scholars, historians, and political scientists.

And yet, Hamilton's views on the matter were not unchallenged at the Founding. The Antifederalist "Brutus," for example, was substantially critical of the form of the judiciary in the proposed Constitution. In his Essay XV, Brutus argued that handing the power of judicial review over to appointed and life-tenured judges was tantamount to surrendering popular control of the Constitution and that judges without political accountability would be dangerous to the people.

The issue of the importance of judicial independence for maintaining limited constitutional government is a vexing one, and I think that we have more assumptionsd than hard evidence on the point. Still, as citizens, it's important to weigh the extent to which granting extensive political independence to courts divorces the constitution from the people.

President Obama Goes Public on the Economy

President Obama's high profile public addresses on his economic policies are a pretty clear attempt to "go public" in the style of Ronald Reagan, despite the mixed success of that strategy. As you look over The New York Times's coverage of his speech to Congress last week, think about what the president's push for economic reforms might have looked like if he had persued a bargaining strategy instead.

LBJ's Persuasion (Not Required)

If you were intrigued by the NPR story on LBJ's recorded phone conversations, you may be interested in this page operated by CSPAN, which has a number of longer LBJ recordings with commentary by professional historians.

Presidential Persuasion

President Johnson may have been the most effective practitioner of the kind of one-on-one persuasion and bargaining that Richard Neustadt believed was the foundation of a successful presidency.

Fortunately for us, LBJ recorded many of the phone calls he made as president, and it's possible to actually listen to him work his way through the process of persuading people to do what he want. National Public Radio did a stroy about LBJ's tapes, which you can listen to here. (If you pay attention to the story, you can hear echoes of Richard Neustadt throughout with constant references to persuaision and bargaining.)

Lecture Slides

Class 12
Class 13
Class 14
Class 15
Class 16