Law | Open Access Articles | Digital Commons Network™

Section 2: Congress & The Obama White House, Institute Of Bill Of Rights Law, William & Mary Law School

Supreme Court Preview

No abstract provided.

The Transformative Twelfth Amendment, Joshua D. Hawley

William & Mary Law Review

Scholars have long treated the Twelfth Amendment as a constitutional obscurity, a merely mechanical adjustment to the electoral college—and perhaps a less than successful one at that. This consensus is mistaken. In fact, the Twelfth Amendment accomplished one of the most consequential changes to the structure of our constitutional government yet. It fundamentally altered the nature of the Executive and the Executive’s relationship to the other branches of government. The Amendment changed the Executive into something it had not been before: a political office. The presidency designed at Philadelphia was intended to be neither a policymaking nor a representative institution, …

Go to article

Congress's (Limited) Power To Represent Itself In Court, Tara Leigh Grove, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

Scholars and jurists have long assumed that, when the executive branch declines to defend a federal statute, Congress may intervene in federal court to defend the law. When invalidating the Defense of Marriage Act, for example, no Supreme Court Justice challenged the authority of the House of Representatives to defend federal laws in at least some circumstances. At the same time, in recent litigation over the Fast and Furious gun-running case, the Department of Justice asserted that the House could not go to court to enforce a subpoena against the executive. In this Article, we seek to challenge both claims. …