The demon and Daniel Webster: Drinking in the antebellum senate

A recollection by Hannibal Hamlin of a speech given by Daniel Webster during the debates over the Compromise of 1850 provides the starting point for a brief examination of Webster's renowned fondness for alcohol. While shedding light upon the extent and culture of drinking among American politicians of the period, the note also provides a poignant perspective on the failure of traditional mechanisms used for resolving disputes in the antebellum Senate.     

Cold War,Public Opinion,and Foreign Policy Spending Decisions: Dynamic Representation by Congress and the President

Conventional wisdom before the Vietnam War held that public opinion exerted no influence on U.S. foreign policy decisions. Scholars working in Vietnam's aftermath found episodic influence of public opinion on foreign policy, but missing in our understanding were longitudinal examinations of public opinion's influence on foreign policy. A number of post-Vietnam scholars subsequently revealed a long-term relationship between public opinion and defense spending. This study extends that work by analyzing responsiveness to public opinion in different foreign policy arenas by different government institutions, and by accounting for a critical variable not relevant in most previous studies: the end of the cold war. We construct a model explaining the influences of public opinion and the cold war on spending proposals for defense and foreign economic aid by the presidency, the House of Representatives and the Senate. Both public opinion and the end of the cold war exert direct influence on defense spending proposals by the presidency, while the Senate and the House respond primarily to public opinion inputs and the partisan composition of the Senate. In the case of foreign economic aid, the cold war's end gives occasion for increasing spending proposals, contrary to the public's expectation that the end of the cold war minimized the need for the U.S. to provide foreign economic assistance.     

Presidential Power vs. Congressional Time: Legislative History in the First Congress of the Civil War

This study tests whether major policy shifts require several years of congressional deliberation before passage even during periods of crisis and disorganization in the minority political party. By examining the passage of major legislation during the Civil War, this study found that legislative history is a relevant and limiting factor in the passage of presidential and congressional agendas even during periods of crisis and disorganization in the minority party.     

Congress and War Powers: Symbolism and Nondecisions in the Struggle for Influence

This article focuses on war powers issues during the Clinton presidency to test the theory of nondecision-making as developed by Bachrach and Baratz (1970) and Lukes (1974). The first section clarifies key theoretical concepts (mobilization of bias and barrier I and barrier II nondecisions) and argues that war powers issues constitute “key issues” in Bachrach and Baratz's terms, thus permitting the formulation of falsifiable nondecision hypotheses. The second section presents four in-depth case studies of troop deployment conflicts from the Clinton administration: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. The third section analyzes the evidence from the four Clinton era cases, revealing a preponderance of nondecisions and essentially symbolic nonbinding resolutions (Edelman 1967; Hinckley 1994). The third section also identifies four mechanisms for deflecting challenges to the prevailing distribution of power (Bachrach and Baratz 1970, 44–48) and shows how all four were employed to deflect challenges to presidential primacy in the various Clinton cases. Following Oppenheimer (1974), the concluding section will offer an expanded vocabulary for classifying various forms of nondecision-making.     

The Presidential Manipulation of Inherited Wars of Choice: Barack Obama's Use of Nixonian Methods as Commander in Chief

Despite their apparent differences, both Richard Nixon and Barack Obama secured their party's nominations and ultimately the presidency partly due to their manipulation of contentious and inherited “wars of choice.” The wars in Vietnam and Iraq provided the political and cultural circumstances that made Nixon and Obama credible “peace candidates” in 1968 and 2008 respectively. Having championed their opposition to the wars to gain the presidency, both men continued the conflicts throughout their first term and subsequently utilized these conflicts to help secure a second term in office, declaring “victory” as part of their re-election campaigns. This study examines the manner in which Obama, like Nixon, benefited as president from an inherited “war of choice” and adopted Nixonian methods to maximize his chances for re-election in 2012.     

Leadership and Coordination in Legislatures: The "President" of the First American Congress: 1774-1789

We analyze the viability of the office of President of Congress as a source of leadership in the Continental and Confederation Congresses.1 Our primary interest is in institutionally grounded, as opposed to and separate from charismatic or personal, bases for leadership. We show that virtually every institutional support for leadership power recognized to be at work in the modern Congress was absent in the Continental Congresses. We trace the origins of these limitations on leadership power and potential to a series of decisions taken during 1774 and 1775 and substantially maintained and even elaborated over the fifteen-year history of the Congress. The result was that even though the institution was awash in "leaders," men like Virginia's Peyton Randolph, Massachusetts' John Hancock, and New York's John Jay, stable and effective "leadership" from the office of President of Congress proved to be impossible.     

Dixie's Power in War and Peace

Book reviewed:
Joseph A. Fry. Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations , 1789 – 1973.     

Stiffening Abe: William Pitt Fessenden and the Role of the Broker Politician in the Civil War Congress

The difficult but by no means dysfunctional relationship between President Abraham Lincoln and Congress remains an understudied aspect of Civil War history. Indeed, it is impossible to arrive at a comprehensive or convincing explanation for Union victory until that relationship is limned more precisely. This article contends that U.S. Senator William Pitt Fessenden (1806–69) played a critical mediating role in the wartime Congress. He did so firstly in his capacities as chair of the Senate finance committee and close associate of U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase and secondly as a public supporter of executive war powers. Although the influential Maine Republican had serious doubts about the effectiveness of the Lincoln administration, his determination to quash the southern rebellion and considerable powers of self‐restraint enabled him to act as an important and constructive broker between the White House and the fractious Republicans on Capitol Hill.