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Full-Text Articles in Legislation
Court-Packing In 2021: Pathways To Democratic Legitimacy, Richard Mailey
Court-Packing In 2021: Pathways To Democratic Legitimacy, Richard Mailey
Seattle University Law Review
This Article asks whether the openness to court-packing expressed by a number of Democratic presidential candidates (e.g., Pete Buttigieg) is democratically defensible. More specifically, it asks whether it is possible to break the apparent link between demagogic populism and court-packing, and it examines three possible ways of doing this via Bruce Ackerman’s dualist theory of constitutional moments—a theory which offers the possibility of legitimating problematic pathways to constitutional change on democratic but non-populist grounds. In the end, the Article suggests that an Ackermanian perspective offers just one, extremely limited pathway to democratically legitimate court-packing in 2021: namely, where a Democratic …
Laboratory Of Democracy: How The District Of Columbia Is Using The Home Rule Act To Achieve Elements Of Statehood, Walter A. Smith Jr., Kevin M. Hilgers
Laboratory Of Democracy: How The District Of Columbia Is Using The Home Rule Act To Achieve Elements Of Statehood, Walter A. Smith Jr., Kevin M. Hilgers
University of the District of Columbia Law Review
On January 3, 2019, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia's (the "District') nonvoting delegate to the House of Representatives, reintroduced the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, which would make much of the District the 51st state. While Norton had made a tradition of opening each new Congress by introducing D.C. democracy bills, the context this time gave District advocates more reason to be optimistic. With the Democrats gaining control of the House, the bill gained a record 155 original cosponsors, and Representative Elijah Cummings, chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, committed to holding a hearing on …