Greg Weiner

Greg Weiner, who teaches political science at Assumption College, is a former political consultant and the author of Madison’s Metronome: The Constitution, Majority Rule and the Tempo of American Politics. He is currently working on a book on the political thought of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

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James MacGregor Burns’ Transformative Constitutionalism

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Virtually everything that James MacGregor Burns—who died on Tuesday at the age of 95 and who is rightly being honored as one of the greatest political scientists of his time—wrote about the Constitution was wonderfully provocative, incisively argued and totally wrong. He was perhaps the leading Constitutional critic of his era, a vital service, even if Burns sometimes performed it, as in his critiques of separation of powers, in demonstrable error. He was a Progressive, both a student and an advocate of what he called “transforming leadership” and a critic of institutional mechanisms that inhibited it.

Perhaps best known among students of American political thought for his critique of separation of powers in 1963’s The Deadlock of Democracy, Burns—then frustrated by the Senate’s obstruction of civil rights legislation he thought to have been publicly endorsed in the 1960 presidential election—believed he had caught James Madison in a mistake. That is hard to do, and Burns’ effort, while innovative, stumbled.

The attempt was this: If Madison, as he claimed, solved the problem of the abusive majority in Federalist 10—and this without relying on institutional blocking mechanisms—why did he need the added security of the separation of powers, which, to the extent it was unnecessary, was also gratuitously undemocratic? Fifteen years later, George W. Carey decisively answered that Madison was not trying to solve the problem of an abusive majority through the separation of powers, he was trying to solve the problem of a tyrannical government—something the Founder explicitly stated in Federalist 51 that he regarded to be a different problem.

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The Band Perry-Rand’s Featherweight Foreign Policy Debate

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John McCain has pronounced on the Paul-Perry-Paul war of foreign-policy op-eds that are available here, here, and here, so let us review the bidding. To believe there are things that exceed U.S. control is to accede to an “absence of American leadership” to which all global ills are traceable. To believe other things, controllable or not, fall outside of U.S. interests is to advocate “a withdrawal to a fortress America” such as preceded World War I. Say what one will about Senator McCain, he knows how to spice up a Sunday show with stark simplicities.

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Defining Impeachment Up

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The red herring of impeachment is forcing the rhetorical argument about the swollen executive to unhelpful extremes. Those in a rhetorical rush to impeachment, especially those who have been threatening it for years, may well be guilty of defining the ultimate constitutional sanction down. The proper response is to argue on prudential grounds against it. It is not—as many are doing—to define impeachment up.

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Will Congress Get Its Groove Back?

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This week witnessed discordant events that may signal a renewal of congressional government while illustrating the peril of relying on another branch of government—the judiciary—to revive it.

In the first, the Supreme Court on Monday granted certiorari in a case, U.S. Department of Transportation v. Association of American Railroads, that could mark the first time since pre-New Deal jurisprudence that it invalidates a law on grounds of nondelegation, the principle that Congress cannot transfer its legislative authority to another branch of government. Then, on Wednesday, Speaker John Boehner announced plans for the House to sue President Obama over non-enforcement of laws.

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Sniff, Collect, and Exploit it All

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The easy shot against Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the U.S. Surveillance State would be to dismiss its warnings as immoderate and overwrought. “Converting the Internet into a system of surveillance,” he declares nearly off the bat (6), turns it “into a tool of repression, threatening to produce the most extreme and oppressive weapon of state intrusion human history has ever seen.” Similarly, “[t]he US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide.” (94) These are bold claims on which to deliver. And yet, piling evidence atop evidence, Greenwald does.

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A Laurel for the Executive Brow

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AUMFA year has now passed since President Obama pledged, in an address at the National Defense University, to “engag[e] Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate.” It has been neither refined nor repealed, and neither Congress nor the American people—I’ve checked my messages—has been engaged on the topic.

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Paying the Debt of Civility

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I’m often asked whether it’s challenging to be a Jewish professor at a Catholic college that takes its religious identity seriously, to which my answer is, first, no, and, second, I certainly prefer it to being a Jewish professor at a Catholic college that takes its religious identity casually. In any event, my contributions to the institution’s Catholicity through participating in its intellectual life are warmly welcomed, and to the extent I am involved in ritual events, I treat them like I would treat being a guest in someone else’s home. Still, my colleagues have been accommodating nearly to a fault. In more than one setting, prayers have been ecumenically tailored to my presence—wholly unnecessarily, but considerately nonetheless.

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Toward a Practice of Bodycheck Constitutionalism

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Routing a political dispute to the courts is the constitutional equivalent of appealing to one’s parents for relief from mistreatment by the bully on the block. How about throwing some weight instead?

Senator Ron Johnson’s fists are stuffed in his pockets as he runs across the Capitol Plaza to the pillared edifice where parental figures in black robes dispense constitutional wisdom evidently inaccessible to the rest of us. The Wisconsin Republican is suing President Obama over the administrative agreement that protects members of Congress and their staff from the legal requirement—which, by the way, was the product of asinine posturing, but which is also, you know, law, which you can tell because it bears the President’s signature—that they purchase insurance on the Obamacare exchanges.

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Law and Moral Obligation II: A Response to Ilya Somin

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Ilya Somin has posted an essay at Volokh that narrows that gap between our views on the source of the moral obligation to obey the law—I certainly agree, for example, that there are exigent circumstances in which one might be not merely entitled but obliged to disobey—but our underlying disagreement persists: whether the calculation itself is an individual or a political one.

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Law and Moral Obligation

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Here and at Volokh, Ilya Somin and Mike Rappaport have been conducting a fruitful exchange over the extent of individuals’ moral obligation to obey the law, but the debate should not obscure the deeper and important philosophical ground on which they apparently agree: a shared assumption that the duty arises from something like an individual utility function. Their dispute seems to pertain to whether the individual should deploy his or her moral calculus at the personal (Somin) or systemic (Rappaport) level. The tougher question is whether any society so conceived and so dedicated—namely, one in which individuals calculate their moral obligation to obey the law as atomized individuals—can long endure.

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