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The Supreme Court, the President, and Congress
Lawmaking in a Separation-of-Powers System
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2022
Abstract
Presidents may react to Supreme Court decisions by supporting or opposing them in their public rhetoric and by calling on Congress to take action to alter or implement the Court’s decisions. We investigate this unique form of lawmaking using an original database of presidential calls to Congress and congressional reactions. We find that presidents call for congressional action to pursue their policy goals and enhance the power of the presidency; we also find that Congress reacts when it is asked to do so by both the Court and the president, as well as when presidents support the implementation of the Court’s decisions.
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- © 2022 Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
Footnotes
We are grateful to Emilia Beuger, Brian Carchedi, Joe Dolciotto, Thomas Kennedy, Brianna Owen, Andy Richardson, Taylor Smoske, Chelsie Trombly, and Michal Wojewodzic for their assistance with the data collection used in this article. We thank Natalie Rogol, Mark Miller, the anonymous reviewers, and the editor for their very useful feedback on previous versions of this work, and Matt Montgomery, Doug Rice, and Natalie Rogol for sharing their data with us. We presented an earlier version of this research at the 2020 Southern Political Science Association Meeting. Replication materials are available in the JLC Dataverse at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/jlc.
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