The U.S. Constitution is clear on the appointment of executive officials: the president nominates, the Senate approves. But on the question of removing those officials, the Constitution is silent—although that silence has not discouraged strenuous efforts to challenge, censure, and even impeach presidents from Andrew Jackson to Bill Clinton. As J. David Alvis, Jeremy D. Bailey, and Flagg Taylor show, the removal power has always been and continues to be a thorny issue, especially as presidential power has expanded dramatically during the past century. Linking this provocative issue to American political and constitutional development, the authors recount removal power debate from the Founding to the present day. Understanding the historical context of outbreaks in the debate, they contend, is essential to sorting out the theoretical claims from partisan maneuvering and sectional interests, enabling readers to better understand the actual constitutional questions involved. After a detailed review of the Decision of 1789, the book examines the initial assertions of executive power theory, particularly by Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, then the rise of the argument for congressional delegation, beginning with the Whigs and ending with the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. The authors chronicle the return of executive power theory in the efforts of Presidents Grant, Hayes, Garfield, and Cleveland, who all battled with Congress over removals, then describe the emergence of new institutional arrangements with the creation of independent regulatory commissions. They conclude by tracking the rise of the unitarians and the challenges that this school has posed to the modern administrative state. Although many scholars consider the matter to have been settled in 1789, the authors argue that a Supreme Court case as recent as 2010—Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board—shows the extent to which questions surrounding removal power remain unresolved and demand more attention. Their work offers a more nuanced and balanced account of the debate, teasing out the logic of the different institutional perspectives on this important constitutional question as no previous book has.

Now in its fourth edition and completely updated, this is the most comprehensive book on constitutional amendments and proposed amendments available. Although only 27 amendments have ever been added to the U.S. Constitution, the last one having been ratified in 1992, throughout American history, members of Congress have introduced more than 11,000 amendments, and countless individuals outside of Congress have advanced their own proposals to revise the Constitution—the wellspring of America's legal, political, and cultural foundations. At a time when calls for a new constitutional convention are on the rise, it is essential for students of political science and history as well as American citizens to understand proposed alternatives. This updated edition of the established standard for high school and college libraries as well as public and law libraries serves as the go-to reference for learning about existing constitutional amendments, proposed amendments, and the issues related to them. An alphabetically arranged two-volume set, it contains more than 500 entries that discuss amendments that have been proposed in Congress from 1789 to the present. It also discusses prominent proposals for extensive constitutional changes introduced outside Congress as well as discussions of major amending issues.

This work will serve as the authoritative reference text on the Supreme Court during the period of 1921 to 1930, when William Howard Taft was Chief Justice. It will become a point of common reference across multiple disciplines, including history, law, and political science.

In William Howard Taft’s Constitutional Progressivism Kevin J. Burns makes a compelling case that Taft’s devotion to the Constitution of 1787 contributed to his progressivism. In contrast to the majority of scholarship, which has viewed Taft as a reactionary conservative because of his constitutionalism, Burns explores the ways Taft’s commitment to both the Constitution and progressivism drove his political career and the decisions he made as president and chief justice. Taft saw the Constitution playing a positive role in American political life, recognizing that it created a national government strong enough to enact broad progressive reforms. In reevaluating Taft’s career, Burns highlights how Taft rejected the “laisser [sic] faire school,” which taught that “the Government ought to do nothing but run a police force.” Recognizing that the massive industrial changes following the Civil War had created a plethora of socioeconomic ills, Taft worked to expand the national government’s initiatives in the fields of trust-busting, land conservation, tariff reform, railroad regulation, and worker safety law. Burns offers a fuller understanding of Taft and his political project by emphasizing Taft’s belief that the Constitution could play a constructive role in American political life by empowering the government to act and by undergirding and protecting the reform legislation the government implemented. Moreover, Taft recognized that if the Constitution could come to the aid of progressivism, political reform might also redound to the benefit of the Constitution by showing its continued relevance and workability in modern America. Although Taft’s efforts to promote significant policy-level reforms attest to his progressivism, his major contribution to American political thought is his understanding of the US Constitution as a fundamental law, not a policy-oriented document. In many ways Taft can be thought of as an originalist, yet his originalism was marked by a belief in robust national powers. Taft’s constitutionalism remains relevant because while his principles seem foreign to modern legal discourse, his constitutional vision offers an alternative to contemporary political divisions by combining political progressivism-liberalism with constitutional conservatism.

This book presents a provocative account of James Madison's political thought by focusing on Madison's lifelong encounter with the enduring problem of constitutional imperfection. In particular, it emphasizes Madison's alliance with Thomas Jefferson, liberating it from those long-standing accounts of Madisonian constitutionalism that emphasize deliberation by elites and constitutional veneration. Contrary to much of the scholarship, this book shows that Madison was aware of the limits of the inventions of political science and held a far more subtle understanding of the possibility of constitutional government than has been recognized. By repositioning Madison as closer to Jefferson and the Revolution of 1800, this book offers a reinterpretation of one of the central figures of the early republic.

Written by a leading scholar of the constitutional amending process, this two-volume encyclopedia, now in its fifth edition, is an indispensable resource for students, legal historians, and high school and college librarians. This authoritative reference resource provides a history and analysis of all 27 ratified amendments to the Constitution, as well as insights and information on thousands of other amendments that have been proposed but never ratified from America's birth until the present day. The set also includes a rich bibliography of informative books, articles, and other media related to constitutional amendments and the amending process.

A stunning revision of our founding document’s evolving history that forces us to confront anew the question that animated the founders so long ago: What is our Constitution? Americans widely believe that the United States Constitution was created when it was drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788. But in a shrewd rereading of the Founding era, Jonathan Gienapp upends this long-held assumption, recovering the unknown story of American constitutional creation in the decade after its adoption—a story with explosive implications for current debates over constitutional originalism and interpretation. When the Constitution first appeared, it was shrouded in uncertainty. Not only was its meaning unclear, but so too was its essential nature. Was the American Constitution a written text, or something else? Was it a legal text? Was it finished or unfinished? What rules would guide its interpretation? Who would adjudicate competing readings? As political leaders put the Constitution to work, none of these questions had answers. Through vigorous debates they confronted the document’s uncertainty, and—over time—how these leaders imagined the Constitution radically changed. They had begun trying to fix, or resolve, an imperfect document, but they ended up fixing, or cementing, a very particular notion of the Constitution as a distinctively textual and historical artifact circumscribed in space and time. This means that some of the Constitution’s most definitive characteristics, ones which are often treated as innate, were only added later and were thus contingent and optional.