Law Commons^™

The Line-Item Veto: The Best Response When Congress Passes One Spending “Bill” A Year, L. Gordon Crovitz

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Limitless Debate: The Filibuster In The 113th Congress, Mark Kogan

Legislation and Policy Brief

Human cloning, the caning of teen vandals, and the belief that aliens descend from space to abduct humans and livestock all hold something in common: they are more popular than Congress. With the 112th Congress bottoming out at a record-low 9% approval rating, it is clear that Americans are deeply unsatisfied with the gridlock gripping Washington. While it is popular, and even easy, to lambaste Republicans for blanket obstructionism and to condemn Democrats for failure to stand up to minority bullying, collective blame shifting will not breach the dam of a hyper-partisan Congress. Instead, individuals hoping to get Congress moving …

Filling The Judicial Vacancies In A Presidential Election Year, Carl Tobias

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Gentle Into That Good Night: Subsidy Expiration Provides A Lesson In Reform Through Inactions, Max Bulinksi

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

After thirty years, Congress let the federal subsidy for corn-based ethanol expire on December 31, 2011. Although the influence of “Big Corn” is not as ubiquitously known as that of “Big Oil” or pharmaceuticals, the agricultural sector is consistently ranked among the top sectors for lobbying expenditures. This political clout is well demonstrated by the extent of the former subsidy. The ethanol subsidy has been in existence for the last thirty years and cost taxpayers roughly six billion dollars in each recent year.

How Jon Stewart And Lady Gaga Made Congress Less Lame: The Impact Of Social Media On The Passage Of Bills Through The "Lame Duck" Session Of The 111th Congress And Beyond, Onika K. Williams

Indiana Law Journal

The lame duck 111th Congress saw tremendous action in a relatively short period of time, and it was also witness to a phenomenon of social media. Users on websites such as Facebook and Twitter employed social media to send messages to their representatives and to actively participate in the lame duck session. Jon Stewart used television to advocate for Congress’s passing of the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, and Lady Gaga employed Twitter to support the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010. Both bills subsequently passed Congress. The social media phenomenon did not end with the …

Congress In Court, Amanda Frost

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Congress rarely participates in litigation about the meaning of federal law. By contrast, the executive branch joins in federal litigation on a regular basis as either a party or amicus curiae. Congress simply assumes that the president’s lawyers adequately represent its interests save in those rare instances when the two branches have a direct conflict. This Article questions that assumption.

The federal judiciary’s approach to statutory and constitutional interpretation diminishes Congress’s influence, often to the benefit of the executive branch. The rise of textualism, the canon of constitutional avoidance, the reliance on Chevron deference, and the courts’ reluctance to second-guess …

Congressional Inquiry And The Federal Criminal Law, J. Richard Broughton

University of Richmond Law Review

This article supports constraint of the modern federal criminal law regime through greater attention to, and use of, congressional investigation and over =sight powers. Through an analysis of the 2009 and 2010 United States House of Representatives hearings on over-criminalization, this article asserts that Congress has political and constitutional incentives to use its investigation and oversight powers to address these problems. Conventional wisdom asserts that political disincentives to reduce the federal criminal law regime and weaknesses in investigative and oversight powers limit congressional effectiveness.

Deruglatory Riders Redux, Thomas O, Mcgarity

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Soon after the 2010 elections placed the Republican Party in control of the House of Representatives, the House took up a number of deregulatory bills. Recognizing that deregulatory legislation had little chance of passing the Senate, which remained under the control of the Democratic Party, or of being signed by President Obama, the House leadership reprised a strategy adopted by the Republican leaders during the 104th Congress in the 1990s. The deregulatory provisions were attached as riders to much-needed legislation in an attempt to force the Senate and the President to accept the deregulatory riders to avoid the adverse consequences …

The Politics Of Physical Education Reform, Ari Zyskind

CMC Senior Theses

The purpose of the paper is to determine why today's youth are so physically inactive by examining the role and efforts of physical education, and the state and federal governments responsibility in supporting these programs, in fighting today's obesity epidemic by creating generations of healthy and physically active children. Research led to the determination that states have failed to maintain and improve physical education resulting in a physically inactive youth. Therefore, the nation should look to federal legislation to support state-led physical education, which this paper found to be constitutional if the enactments followed the provisions established in South Dakota …

The Disdain Campaign, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A response to Pamela S. Karlan, The Supreme Court 2011 Term Forward: Democracy and Disdain, 126 Harv. L. Rev. 1 (2012).

In her Foreword, Professor Pamela Karlan offers a quite remarkable critique of the conservative Justices on the Supreme Court. She faults them not so much for the doctrines they purport to follow, or outcomes they reach, but for the attitude they allegedly manifest toward Congress and the people. “My focus here is not so much on the content of the doctrine but on the character of the analysis.” She describes Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion of the Court as …

Drafting Proper Short Bill Titles: Do States Have The Answer?, Brian Christopher Jones

Brian Christopher Jones

No abstract provided.