Court politics in a federal polity

Filling the Federal Appellate Court Vacancies

Multiple observers have criticized President Barack Obama’s discharge of his Article II constitutional responsibility to nominate and confirm federal judges. Senators have blamed the administration for slowly making nominations, liberals have contended that the executive appointed myriad candidates who are not sufficiently centrist, and conservatives have alleged that President Obama proffered ...

Politics of Federal Health Policy, 1960-75: A Perspective

Although the idea of establishing a Federal insurance program to cover the major costs of health care for the elderly was not new in the late 1950s, it was only when John Kennedy became a presidential candidate that the national debate on the issue began in earnest. But it would be almost 5 years later before the issue was finally resolved. During that 5-year period, the desirability of establi...

The Politics of Employment Discrimination in the Federal Bureaucracy*

THE federal government is the largest employer in the United States. In 1978, it employed over 2.4 million full-time civilian workers, of whom 31.1 percent were women, and 22.0 percent were classified as minority employees.' The evidence in several recent studies suggests that the earnings of minorities and women employed by the federal government are substantially lower than the earnings of "s...

Supreme Court Alchemy: Turning Law and Politics into Mayonnaise

How do law and politics intertwine in Supreme Court adjudication? Traditionally, in law schools and political science departments, scholars refused to mix law and politics. Law professors insisted that legal texts and doctrines controlled Supreme Court decision making, while political scientists maintained that political ideologies dictated the justices'votes. In the late twentieth century, som...

Do Supreme Court Nominees Lie? The Politics of Adjudication