Skip to main content

Book Review: The Presidents and the Constitution

By
The Presidents and the Constitution: A Living History, Ken Gormley, ed. (2016), KF 5053 .P75 2016

Article II of the Constitution, at little over 1000 words, is the provision in which most of the power of the American presidency is housed.  Those words grant the office of the President great power, but its limits and relationship to the judicial and legislative branches is not well defined. In the new book  The Presidents and the Constitution: A Living History, Ken Gormely tells the story of America’s forty-four presidents and how each one interfaced with the Constitution.  With a chapter devoted to each presidency, it is a collection of essays focused on the major constitutional issues each president faced.

The collection gives each President a compact biography, followed by a discussion of the major issues that President faced relating to the extent of executive power, influence on the judiciary, and the President’s role in foreign affairs. The tightly edited collection devotes little over twelve pages to each President, preferring to concentrate on the events having the greatest long-term effects rather than the minutiae of every policy decision.  For example, the chapter devoted to Andrew Jackson, by Mark A. Graber,  focuses on his bank veto (limiting federal powers) and the Proclamation on Nullification (expanding federal powers) and the historical context for these seemingly contradictory positions. This approach allows for the reader to learn a great amount about the character of each presidency in a single sitting, and it is inviting to return to again and again.


This fascinating volume examines the tensions between the branches of government and puts them in a personal and historical perspective for each presidency. It is sure to make great election year reading, and invites the author to wonder what issues and decisions will come to define our next President’s term. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing, but True, Deportation Story of Carlos Marcello

By
Earlier this week, the University of Houston Law Center was fortunate to have as its guest Professor Daniel Kanstroom of Boston College of Law. An expert in immigration law, he is the Director of the International Human Rights Program, and he both founded and directs the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Speaking as the guest of the Houston Journal of International Law’s annual Fall Lecture Series, Professor Kanstroom discussed issues raised in his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora . Professor Michael Olivas introduced Professor Kanstroom to the audience, and mentioned the fascinating tale of Carlos Marcello, which Professor Kanstroom wrote about in his chapter “The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello,” in Immigration Stories , a collection of narratives about leading immigration law cases. My interest piqued, I read and was amazed by Kanstroom’s description of one of the most interesting figures in American le
1 comment
Read more

C-SPAN Video Archive Now Online

By
Legislative researchers and politics fans take note. C-SPAN recently completed a digitization project placing the entirety of its video collection online. The archives record all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. The videos are available at no cost for historical, educational, research, and archival uses. The database includes over 160,000 hours of video recorded since 1987 and the programs are indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and locations. The most recent, most watched, and most shared videos are highlighted on the main page. To start watching, visit the C-SPAN Video Library and use the search function at the top of the page.
Post a Comment
Read more

Texas Subsequent History Table Ceases Publication

By
This week, Thomson Reuters notified subscribers that publication of the Texas Subsequent History Table will be discontinued and no further updates will be produced, due to “insufficient market interest.” Practitioners have been extracting writ (and since 1997, petition) history from the tables since their initial publication in 1917 as The Complete Texas Writs of Error Table . The tables, later published by West, have been used for nearly a century to determine how the Texas Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals disposed of an appeal from an intermediate appellate court. The purpose of adding this notation to citations is to indicate the effect of the Texas Supreme Court’s action on the weight of authority of the Court of Appeals’ opinion.  For example, practitioners may prefer to use as authority a case that the Texas Supreme Court has determined is correct both in result and legal principles applied (petition refused), rather than one that simply presents no error that requires
Post a Comment
Read more