A Few Movie Clips to Finish the Course

Allegory:  The Lion King (1994)

where it came from....

The lure of fascism: Gabriel Over the White House (1933):

Prophecy: Contagion (2011!)

The rule of law:  A Man for All Seasons (1966)

What makes us Americans: Bridge of Spies (2015):

Practice Final

I. Identifications. 

Explain the meaning and significance of 12 of the 15 following items (4 points each).Each answer should be a brief paragraph. 

What is fair game for an identification?

• Items that we have discussed in class or on the blog;
• Items that appear in bold or italics in the readings, or are in the glossary or key terms lists in Lowi;
• Items that cover several pages in the readings.

1. Iron Triangle
2. Majority faction
3. Latinx
4. "Shadow machines"
5. Civil religion
6. National Economic Council
7. PAC
8. Party identification
9. Socialization
10. Amicus curiae
11. The House Bank
12. Exclusionary rule
13. Unfunded mandate
14. Expressed powers
15. Descriptive representation

II. Short answers. 

Answer 3 of 5 (6 points each). Each answer should be a brief paragraph.

1. Briefly explain: “I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous.”
2. Briefly explain: “Our written laws are often hard to understand, but everyone can read them, whereas nothing could be more obscure and out of research of the common man than a law founded on precedent.”
3. Briefly explain: "The Constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error."
4. Did the Framers believe in "republics" but disdain democracy?
5. How did the structure of local government hinder the response to the Eaton and Palisades fires?

III.  General Essays. 

Answer 2 of 3 (17 points each). Each answer should take 3-4 small bluebook pages.

1. How would Tocqueville explain why a case such as Edwards v. Aguillard came to the Supreme Court?
2. Explain the major ways in which Congress can check the president. Do they still work?
3. See this article. Why did the witness invoke Madison and Hamilton? What would supporters and opponents of the president say to these Founders? https://www.foxnews.com/politics/impeachment-witness-tells-lawmakers-to-consider-having-to-answer-to-hamilton-and-madison-in-the-afterlife 

IV. Bonus questions (one point each) Very briefly identify the following:

• Scott Bessent
• Beryl Howell
• James Clyburn
• Ryan Iwasaka
• Kari Lake

Religion, Immigration, and War

Will post a practice final this week.

Adjourn at noon for student experience survey

Bellah:

Considering the separation of church and state, how is a president justified in using the word "God" at all? The answer is that the separation of church and state has not denied the political realm a religious dimension. Although matters of personal religious belief, worship, and association are considered to be strictly private affairs, there are, at the same time, certain common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share. These have played a crucial role in the development of American institutions and still provide a religious dimension for the whole fabric of American life, including the political sphere. This public religious dimension is expressed in a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals that I am calling American civil religion. The inauguration of a president is an important ceremonial event in this religion. It reaffirms, among other things, the religious legitimation of the highest political authority. 

JFK:

Solemn oath

JFK quoted the Protestant King James Bible, not the Catholic Confraternity Douay Bible.  Protestant Ted Sorensen actually wrote the speech.  

See his 1960 speech to the Houston Ministerial Association (start about one minute in):

• Winthrop's "City on a Hill" (New Testament verse)
• The Liberty Bell: "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof" (Leviticus 25:10)
• 1777 Thanksgiving Proclamation

SCOTUS 

• Supeme Court  door and a problematic frieze

Trends in religion

Immigration:

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (JFK supported, LBJ saw it become law)

Immigration trends (Mo is a CMC alum)

War

• Religion, immigration, and the Manhattan Project
• Forbes story

Disability:

Interest Groups II: Community Organizing

 For next Monday: http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm

Also on Monday, bring your devices to complete the Student Experience Survey

Review: Ballot measures: Dialysis example and SEIU

Tocqueville (Lawrence/Mayer ed., pp. 513, 518):

Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types- religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Americans combine to give fêtes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the antipodes. Hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape in that way. Finally, if they want to proclaim a truth of propagate some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association. In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.

...

It often happens in democratic countries that many men who have the desire or directed toward that light, and those wandering spirits who had long sought each other the need to associate cannot do it, because all being very small and lost in the crowd, they do not see each other and do not know where to find each other. Up comes a newspaper that exposes to their view the sentiment or the idea that had been presented to each of them simultaneously but separately. All are immediately in the shadows finally meet each other and unite.

Nonprofits in the United States

DIPLOMA DIVIDE AND CIVIC PARTICIPATION

The epigraph page

Yes, Hillary Rodham did write her senior thesis on Alinsky.  Here it is.

Alinsky and the Capone Gang

"Rules of Ethics" according to Alinsky:

• One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue (26). [Also see Madison: As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves.]
• The judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment (26)
• "The Declaration of Independence, as a declaration of war, had to be what it was, a 100 percent statement of the justice of the cause of the colonists and a 100 percent denunciation of the role of the British government as evil and unjust" (28)

TACTICS

• RULE 1: Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.
• RULE 2: Never go outside the experience of your people
• RULE 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy
• RULE 4: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
• RULE 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
• RULE 6: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. (compare with p. 139-41)
• RULE 7: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
• RULE 8: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
• RULE 9: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
• RULE 10: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
• RULE 11: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
• RULE 12: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
• RULE 13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

TIME IN JAIL" (156-158)

Interest Groups I

Crosstabs of the NYT Poll

For Wednesday:

• Tocqueville 189-203, 513-524.
•  Alinsky chapter (on Canvas). Don't worry: it's easy reading.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DISCUSS NEXT WEEK?

In Federalist 10, Madison described the sources of faction

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions... But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. 

Just about every group has an organization -- even this one. 

DO NOT REDUCE INFLUENCE TO CAMPAIGN MONEY

ALSO FOREIGN INTERESTS

Means of Influence

The Inside Game

VIDEO ON INTEREST GROUPS AND THE LOBBYING INDUSTRY

FEDERAL LOBBYING DATA

• Includes only a fraction of total spending on efforts to influence government;
• Does not include state and local spending;
• Does not include campaign finance.

In-House and Contract Lobbyists  (a CMC example!)

Lobbying activities

• Talking to members and staff
• Testimony
• Writing

Court cases and amicus briefs

The outside game

• Advertising
• Public relations
• Grassroots and Grasstops
• Charity (in CA, "behesting")
• Funding think tanks

More dubious stuff: Hunter Biden and Memecoin

Ballot measures: Dialysis example and SEIU

Parties II

For next time, Lowi, ch. 12

Party in Government (PIG)

• Party Divisions in the House
• Party Divisions in the Senate
• State Government Control 

Party Organization (PO)

Campaign Finance 

Party Outside Groups (POG)

Super PAC

 Political realism: How hacks, machines,big money, and back-room deals can strengthen American democracyBy Jonathan Rauch

Plunkitt, Tweed, and Machines

Transparency v. Compromise

Super PACs as "Shadow Machines"

Machines and Community Organizing (a week from today)

Parties I

For Wednesday:

Jonathan Rauch, "Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy," Brookings, May 2015, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/political-realism-rauch2.pdf      

PIE/PO/PIG/POG

"Great Parties"

Tocqueville (175): “What I call great political parties are those more attached to principles than to consequences, to generalities rather than to particular cases, to ideas rather than to personalities... America has had great parties; now they no longer exist”

In a 1793 letter to Madison, Jefferson laid out the battle lines on France, but really describes the embryonic first party system:

The line is now drawing so clearly as to shew, on one side, 1. the fashionable circles of Phila., N. York, Boston and Charleston (natural aristocrats), 2. merchants trading on British capitals. 3. paper men, (all the old tories are found in some one of these three descriptions).

On the other side are 1. merchants trading on their own capitals. 2. Irish merchants, 3. tradesmen, mechanics, farmers and every other possible description of our citizens.

Party in the Electorate (PIE)

History

• A cinematic map of presidential voting
• 1896 and 2000

Historical party affiliation  (Party registration and

•  party affiliation or identification are not the same thing)  
• Independents and "leaners"
• Recent trends
• Party coalitions

RELIGION AND THE PARTY COALITIONS

GEOGRAPHY

Party in Government (PIG)

• Party Divisions in the House
• Party Divisions in the Senate
• State Government Control 

Party Organization (PO)

Party Outside Groups (POG)

Elections II

 For Monday:

• Lowi, ch. 11.
• Tocqueville, pp. 174-179.

Turnout: VAP and VEP

• Historical
• Demographics
• Youth:  WHY IS TURNOUT LOWER AMONG YOUNGER PEOPLE?
• By state

Direct Democracy (Lowi 326-327)

Districts (Lowi, 323)

• A gerrymandering game
• Democratic gerrymander in Illinois
• Republican gerrymander in NC

Explaining Elections:  Geography and the Electoral College (more next week)

Explaining Elections:  Demographics

• Gender and Marital Status
• The Diploma Divice
• Black vote and Malcolm X
• Latinos and issues (see table 5, p. 7)

Explaining Elections:  Economics

Campaigns

• Spending
• Commercials!

Elections

Fourth assignment

Final Exam

For next time, 

• Mike Madrid, The Latino Century: How America's Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), EXCERPTS ON CANVAS.
• Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet”  http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/malcolm_x_ballot.html

Election Laws -- THE UNITED STATES RUNS ELECTIONS AT THE STATE AND LOCAL LEVEL.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A NATIONAL BALLOT. 

Units

• 50 states
• 3144 counties
• 87,693 other local governments
• 176,933 election precincts
• About 519,000 elected officials

Federal laws

• 15th Amendment -- right to vote, by race
• 19th Amendment -- women's suffrage
• 23d Amendment -- DC presidential voting
• 24th Amendment -- poll taxes
• 26th Amendment --  18-year-old vote
• Voting Rights  Act

State laws

• Voter registration deadlines
• Voter identification laws
• Convenience Voting (graph)
• Felon voting rights:

Turnout: VAP and VEP

• Historical
• Demographics
• Youth
• By state

Districts (Lowi, 323)

• A gerrymandering game

Fourth Assignment

Choose one:

1.  Pick a democratic country with which you are familiar, either through study or firsthand experience.  How does that country's party system differ from that of the United States?  Consider demographics, ideology, electoral process, and governmental structure.

2. Pick any elected official (e.g., federal or state lawmaker, mayor, supervisor) who serves the area from which you come.  (President and vice president do not count.)  If you are an international student, just pick one who interests you.  How did that person get that office?  Consider the official's characteristics and support base, as well as the makeup of the constituency.  If that constituency strongly favors one party or the other, consider how the official became the party's choice.  Again, pay attention to the local electoral process.

Instructions:

• Document your claims. Do not write from the top of your head. 
• Essays should be double-spaced and no more than three pages long. I will not read past the third page.
• Essays should be in the form of Word documents.  Do not submit pdfs, or Google docs.
• Cite your sources with endnotes in Chicago/Turabian style. Endnote pages do not count against the page limit.
• Do not use ChatGPT or any other generative AI. Misrepresenting AI-generated content as your own work is plagiarism.  It will result in a referral to the Academic Standards Committee.  
• Watch your spelling, grammar, diction, and punctuation. Errors will count against you.
• Turn in essays to  Canvas by 11:59 PM,  Monday, April 28:  note the extra time. (If you have trouble with Canvas, simply email your essay to me as an attached Word file.) I reserve the right to dock essays a gradepoint for one day’s lateness, a full letter grade after that.

Studying for the Final Exam

The final exam for this course will take place in our regular classroom on Tuesday, May 13 from 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM.  It will have three parts.  

Part I: Identifications (4 points each)  In two or three sentences each, briefly identify the meaning and significance of 12 out of 14 names or terms.  These items will come from the "key terms" list at the end of each Lowi chapter, the topics of other assigned readings, and items we discussed in class.  Also see the blog and your own class notes.  (If you have not been taking notes, you should start.)

Part II. Short essays. Answer three of four. Each answer should take about half a page. (6 points each).  These questions will involve key passages from Tocqueville, the Federalist, and other course readings, as well as topics we discussed in class.  Again, the blog and class notes will be an important source.

Part III.  Longer essays. Answer two of three essay questions (17 points each). Each answer should take about 2-3 large bluebook pages or 3-4 small bluebook pages.  Here you should show that you can discuss some of the broader themes of the course.

Bonus questions.  For one point each, identify relatively obscure names from current events or the readings. 

For examples, see the "air midterm" that I posted earlier.  I shall also post a practice final toward the end of the semester.

Mass Media

For Monday, Lowi, ch. 10.

Who are journalists?

The decline of newspapers

IF YOU ARE PLANNING ON A JOB AS A JOURNALIST, SOME ITEMS TO CONSIDER:

From Pew:

Main sources for news (see Lowi 299)

Trust in media 

SPOTTING FAKE NEWS

A quiz

A longer quiz

Giving airtime to conspiracy theory:  Rep. Luna and the Oswald film

(enlarged still)

Pink slime sites:  right and left

Navarro FT article

Peter Navarro managed to get an opinion piece on the Trump tariffs published in the FT (surprising enough in itself). Navarro's rhetoric isn't really new, but the 900+ comments are worth sticking around for – the FT comments are unrelenting (even more so than usual).

Public Opinion

Post papers to Canvas 

This week, I will put up a guide to studying for the final.

For Wednesday, https://libguides.sandiego.edu/fakenews 

What is public opinion?

Attitudes: "evaluative" and "affective" orientations:  approve/disapprove and like/dislike

Knowledge (Lowi 288-289):  Most people, most of the time, know very little about politics.

• Constitutional and institutional knowledge
• "From the River to the Sea"
• Auschwitz
• Location of Korea, Iran, and Ukraine on a map.
• Dihydrogen monoxide

Sources of public opinion (Lowi 277)

Self-interest

Madison, Federalist 10: "As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self­love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves."

Socialization

Family and Identity:  direct and indirect influence

Ideology (Lowi 279-280)

Trump Approval

Trade:  impact of education and party

Measuring Public Opinion

• Polls and Surveys: FAQs
• Response rates
• Nonresponse bias
• Nonattitudes (or pseudo-opinions): Agrabah and Panetta-Burns
• Question wording: the example of civil rights

The Law, Continued

For Monday: Lowi, ch. 9.

Election in Wisconsin

The Court System

• Guide to Supreme Court decisions
• Tocqueville (p. 270): “There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one”  
• NATIONWIDE INJUNCTIONS

Edwards v Aguillard

Amicus briefs

Decision and opinions

Edwards v. Aguillard oral argument (start around 26:00)

From Topkis's comments -- an example of the value of slow reading:

Now, this bill was of course drafted by a theologian, or somebody versed in apologetics.

There's an amusing bit of evidence on that subject in the very language of the bill.

The bill keeps using... the Act keeps using the term "evidences" in the plural.

We lawyers never speak of "evidences" in the plural. We speak of "evidence", the singular.

And I got nagged by it, and I looked it up the other day.

And of course the only dictionary reference to "evidences" is to Christian apologetics: the evidences for Christianity. This is a matter of theological disputation.

Tocqueville (p. 267): "Nothing could be more obscure and out of reach of the common man than a law founded on precedent…. A French lawyer is just a man of learning, but an English or an American one is somewhat like the Egyptian priests, being, as they were, the only interpreters of an occult science."

• SCOTUS demographics
• The Senate and Supreme Court nominations

Debate over court makeup

Judicial activism (Lowi 2665-268)

Clarence Thomas:



In hearings, senators try to get judicial nominees on the record.  NOTE WHAT ALITO SAYS (START AT 18:45) ABOUT STARE DECISIS.





Merrick Garland and "the Biden Rule" 

Gorsuch and the nuclear option 

KBJ

Blue Slips and Senatorial Courtesy (Lowis 247-248)

The Law

 For next time:  

• Edwards v. Aguillard (482 U.S. 578 (1987)), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/482/578/case.html. Read the syllabus, skim and sample the opinions.  See background materials here:  https://www.oyez.org/cases/1986/85-1513.

Two words to know about the law:  legal fees.

Some basic distinctions

Statutes, Regulations, Judge-made law

The Dangers of the Law

• Tocqueville (p. 267): "Our written laws are often hard to understand, but everyone can read them, whereas nothing could be more obscure and out of reach of the common man than a law founded on precedent.”
• How many federal crimes are there?
• Prosecutorial discretion
• Three felonies a day
• Costs
• Most district attorneys  are elected officials.
• "In most developed countries, particularly in continental Western Europe, Canada, and Japan, prosecutors are resolutely nonpolitical and nonpartisan. They are expected to make decisions about individual cases on their merits, without regard to public attitudes, opinions, and emotions or to politicians’ preferences or priorities. In the United States, however, local chief prosecutors in 45 states are elected (Perry 2006).1 In the federal system, US attorneys are appointed on the basis of partisan and sometimes ideological criteria. American prosecutors sometimes openly and unashamedly take media reactions, public opinion, and political considerations into account when deciding what cases to prosecute and how to handle them."
• Most sheriffs are elected officials.
• Many states elect judges -- key Wisconsin race is under way right now.

Trials and Juries

• Less than three percent of criminal cases go to trial.  The rest end in plea deals.
• The "joy" of jury duty
• My jury experience
• Also watch this clip from the 1959 movie Anatomy of a Murder. Read background here, which explains why law school profs show this clip in courses on criminal law.  Note: the scene includes brief references to sexual assault.
• Tocqueville (p. 275):

Juries invest each citizen with a sort of magisterial office; they make all men feel that they have duties toward society and that they take a share in its government. By making men pay attention to things other than their own affairs, they combat that individual selfishness which is like rust in society.

Juries are wonderfully effective in shaping a nation’s judgment and increasing its natural lights. That, in my view, is its greatest advantage. It should be regarded as free school which is always open and in which each juror learns his rights, comes into daily contact with the best-educated and most-enlightened members of the upper classes, and is given practical lessons in the law, lessons which the advocate’s efforts, the judge’s advice, and also the very passions of the litigants bring within his mental grasp. I think that the main reason for the practical intelligence and the political good sense of the Americans is their long experience with juries in civil cases.

Civil, Criminal, and Public Law (Lowis, 242)

• Even if they win acquittal in a criminal cases, defendants might still face civil suits. See O.J. Simpson

State and Local Judges

Federal Judges

Appellate Courts

• Guide to Supreme Court decisions
• The Senate and Supreme Court nominations
• SCOTUS demographics
• Tocqueville (p. 270): “There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one”  
•