Only the United States supreme court justice has ever been impeached. In January 1804, the House of Representatives began a formal inquiry into the official conduct of Associate Justice Samuel Chase and approved eight articles of impeachment in November of that same year. The Senate held a trial of the justice in February 1805, which concluded with his acquittal on March 1. On the final article of impeachment, Chase escaped removal by four votes.

The origins of the American university system are generally traced to a reform cycle that began in the late 1890s and culminated in the 1920s when most colleges and universities adopted institutional structures, faculty routines, and financial systems that approximated those of a modern corporation. As contemporary educational historians have rewritten the saga of higher education reform, the institutional changes that swept through colleges during this formative period have come to be viewed as a virtually inevitable functional response to the demands of political and economic modernization. The underlying historiographic theme of modernization theory is that as higher institutions expanded in size, internal diversity, and organizational complexity, university presidents responded with the only feasible administrative alternative that could restore effective control and economic efficiency to educational institutions. Indeed, Laurence Veysey's classic rendition of this scenario concludes that a corporate type of bureaucratic administration became “essential” if higher institutions were to avoid educational confusion and fiscal insolvency, while adjusting to the cultural, economic, and political demands placed on them by industrial society.

On 7 December 1998, National Review published a short piece by Stephen Moore—one in a continuing stream of articles, reports, and books emerging from the network of conservative media outlets and think tanks. The article ostensibly addressed a then-raging public debate regarding what the Federal Reserve Board could do to keep America’s economy growing, but Moore quickly seized the opportunity to shift attention toward the actions available to Congress and the president. “If there is any single enduring economic lesson of the past twenty years,” Moore observed, “it is that loose monetary policy cannot offset the negative effects of a punitive tax and regulatory regime.” In Moore’s judgment, growing levels of taxation were quickly approaching the danger zone that historically had triggered recessions. A large tax cut “would not just stimulate the U.S. economy, but would serve as an antidote to the global economic crisis.” Those actions should be paired with relieving the domestic regulatory burden on business, for environmental, consumer, and workplace regulations have “a vise grip around the economy.”

The precipitous decline in collective bargaining between employees and employers during the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century in the United States should tell us something useful about American political development. The decline of collective bargaining is about more than waning union influence or competitive conditions in the labor market because collective bargaining was the primary expression of the regime established by the New Deal Democratic Party electoral coalition. For a generation, labor-management bargaining epitomized empowered liberal democracy which, acting through the legislative branch, established a new legal regime of industrial order. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA) shaped a pluralist industrial order by creating new rules that curbed the authority of managers and compelled business firms to participate with unions in a process of rational bargaining based on the assumption of competing employee and employer interests.I do not mean to suggest that the place of collective bargaining was uncontested. Scholars, however, launched major efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to understand how “industrial relations” fit into the emerging conception of pluralism. This was an important effort because union-management relations were central to the New Deal Democracy. For example, John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1956); Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom, Politics, Economics and Welfare: Planning and Politico-Economic Systems Resolved into Basic Social Processes (New York: Harper and Row, 1953); Clark Kerr, Labor Markets and Wage Determination: The Balkanization of Labor Markets and Others Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Clark Kerr, John T. Dunlop, Frederick Harbison, and Charles A. Myers, Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problems of Labor and Management in Economic Growth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1966); J. David Greenstone, Labor in American Politics (New York: Vintage, 1969). By the mid-1960s, industrial relations was a rare topic for political science investigation; aside from Greenstone, political science conceived “labor” and “work” to be “private interests” and not a matter of political significance. Yet collective bargaining is no longer the focal point for industrial relations, and industrial relations no longer occupies the center of governing attention. The various reasons for this trend have attracted significant scholarly attention; however, the issue is confounded by arguments that union decline is a wrongly conceived topic to investigate.

Although the concept of the “modern” presidency is not precisely defined in presidential studies, most scholars agree that a plebiscitary approach to executive leadership has dominated the American political landscape for much of the past century. The characteristics of this “plebiscitary presidency” include aggressive assertions of executive independence, direct appeals to the people, active manipulation of public opinion, and, binding all these together, a new emphasis on rhetorical prowess.Samuel Kernell, Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1997); Jeffrey Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Theodore Lowi, The Personal President (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Richard Rose, The Post-Modern President (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1988); Ryan J. Barilleaux, The Post-Modern Presidency: The Office After Reagan (New York: Praeger, 1988). These characteristics are associated with enhanced resources for the exercise of leadership, but they stimulate, and sit in an uncertain balance with, a vast expansion of expectations for leadership.

The U.S. led the world in environmental policy in the 1970s, but now lags behind comparable nations and resists joining others in tackling climate change. Two embedded, entwined, and exceptional American institutions—broad private property rights and competitive federalism—are necessary for explaining this shift. These two institutions shaped the exceptional stringency of 1970s American environmental laws and the powerful backlash against these laws that continues today. American colonies ensured broad private rights to use land and natural resources for profit. The colonies and the independent state governments that followed wielded expansive authority to govern this commodified environment. In the 1780s, Congress underwrote state governance of the privatized environment by directing the parceling and transfer of federal land to private parties and of environmental governance to future states. The 1787 Constitution cemented these relationships and exposed states to interstate economic competition. Environmental laws of the 1970s imposed unprecedented challenges to the environmental prerogatives long protected by these institutions, and the beneficiaries responded with a wide-ranging counterattack. Federalism enabled this opposition to build powerful regional alliances to stymie action on climate change. These overlooked institutional factors are necessary to explain why Canadian and American environmental policies have diverged.

For the first time since 1860, our collective future as an ideologically coherent and nominally democratic nation is at risk. In the short, medium, and long term, our nation faces several systemic and intertwined threats. Because these cascading crises threaten our fundamental political ideals and our lives, we recommend here a rapid and careful reorientation of at least some part of American political development (APD) toward a scholarship of foresight—that is, one based on the premise that anticipating and shaping the future is now as important as or more important than understanding the past. The article first considers some of the ways in which APD is tethered to the past and then discusses how several of the subfield's analytical approaches are compatible with a scholarship of foresight. Prognosis, prediction, and projection, we argue, are analytical tools that can inform prescription. We conclude with five sets of recommendations that can help APD scholars consider turning their attention toward the future.

Broad developments in the political economy, coupled with the effects of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (FECA) and its amendments, have weakened organized labor's position in campaign politics. The number of business-related political action committees (PACs) exploded at the end of 1975, and quickly dwarfed the number of labor PACs. More significant are trends in spending. In 1977–1978 business-related PACs outcontributed labor committees by approximately $5.6 million, and in 1979–1980 the gap grew to $17 million. In 1993–1994 business PACs outcontributed unions by $60 million, and in 1995–1996 the figure was around $68 million.The FEC's scheme for classifying PACs makes it difficult to account for all business spending. The figures presented here are based on the conservative approach taken by Edwin Epstein, who counted all corporate spending and half of the spending by PACs classified by the FEC as Trade/Membership/Health and Cooperatives as business-related. Edwin M. Epstein, “Labor's Eroding Position in American Electoral Politics,” in Charles Bulmer and John L. Carmichael, eds., Employment and Labor Relations Policy (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1980), 151–78; Epstein, “Business and Labor Under the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971,” in Michael Malbin, ed., Parties, Interest Groups, and Campaign Finance Laws (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1980), 107–51. This approach is superior to the FEC's classification, but almost certainly understates business-related PAC spending. Makinson and Goldstein's method probably exaggerates business spending, but they found over $40 million more in business PAC contributions to candidates in 1991–1992 than I found using the Epstein approach. Larry Makinson and Joshua Goldstein, Open Secrets: The Encyclopedia of Congressional Money and Politics, 3d ed. (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1994), 22. These figures are impressive, but they probably underestimate the full dimensions of the gap between business and labor PAC spending. The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) uses a more inclusive definition of “business PACs” than the Federal Election Commission (FEC), and found that business committees outspent union PACs by $36 million in 1987–88, and nearly $100 million in 1995–1996.Larry Makinson, Open Secrets: The Dollar Power of PACs in Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1990), 19; Larry Makinson, Open Secrets: The Encyclopedia of Congressional Money and Politics, 2d ed. (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1992), 21; Makinson and Goldstein, Open Secrets, 3d ed., 21; Center for Responsive Politics, “Business-Labor-Ideology Split in Donations from PACs,” http://www.crp.org/pubs/bigpicture/blio/bpbliopac.html. There is some dispute about the full magnitude of the differences between business and labor PAC contributions, but it is clear that there is a large and growing gap between direct contributions to candidates from business and from labor.

In 1916, Charles A. Beard was denouncing Germany as “a danger to civilization” and calling for American participation in World War I on the side of the Entente Allies. Like John Dewey and other social-democrats, Beard saw the Great War as an opportunity to advance the interests of the European working class by breaking “the union of the Hohenzollern military caste and the German masses whose radical leaders are Social Democrats”. Even after the Versailles Treaty, Beard continued to embrace the Wilsonian theme that the Great War had been fought to make the world safe for democracy. However, by the mid–1980s, he was staunchly opposed to war with Germany and Japan, had come to embrace the revisionist history of World War I, and even testified before Congress against the Lend-Lease Act. Thus, intellectual historians agree that somewhere between the end of World War I and the 1930s, Beard shifted from internationalism to isolationism and, indeed, a few critics have referred to him as a pacifist in his later years. Within the umbrella of this consensus, debates among biographers, intellectual and diplomatic historians, have come to center largely on identifying the timing and the reasons for Beard's “conversion” to isolationism. Not coincidentally, during the 1960s and 1970s, Beard's writings on foreign policy and diplomatic history enjoyed a resurgence among many on the New Left who were constructing their own revisionist history critical of America's political and military involvement in various Third World countries. Today, Beard's views are still cited in international relations and history textbooks as an example of isolationist theory in American foreign policy.

From the mid–1800s through the mid–1980s, the federal government initiated programs to manage three types of resources on the lands that it controlled. The discovery of gold in California and elsewhere in the West prompted the first government policy in the 1860s. Debate over the nation's forests began in the 1870s, and a system of national forests to be managed by a federal Forest Service was created in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And in the 1930s, the government finally began to manage the lands no one wanted, its grazing lands. The federal government continues to be an active manager of national resources. Indeed, with control of nearly 30 percent of the nation's land, it is the largest land manager in the country.

Although the political presence of business in the economic development of American cities has been richly documented, there has been much less attention to how and why urban business politics has changed in the course of our history. Indeed, the political circumstances and problems of the early Republic's merchant entrepreneurs in the towns seem remote from those of urban business leaders of postindustrial America, with its giant cities and megacorporations. The challenge remains of identifying forces of continuity and change that have shaped relations between business and city governments in urban economic development.

Was the American Federation of Labor's (AFL) embrace of “voluntarism” a decisive turning point in American labor and political history? Voluntarism was the belief that trade unions should focus on “pure and simple” gains in wages and working conditions, rather than independent labor politics and industrial unionism. This belief dominated AFL strategy by 1900, and the results seem self-evident. By rejecting public health insurance, unemployment insurance, and inclusive labor regulations, the Progressive era AFL helped delay the emergence of American social welfare protections and contributed to their limited reach. By rejecting an alliance with a social democratic political party and by unionizing on the basis of broad industries rather than narrow crafts, the AFL circumscribed the scope and ambition of American labor organization. Today American trade unions provide far less inclusive representation of the workforce than is true in comparable nations,Franz Traxler, “Collective Bargaining and Industrial Change: A Case of Disorganization? A Comparative Analysis of Eighteen OECD Countries,” European Sociological Review 12 (1996):271–87; Bruce Western, Between Class and Market: Postwar Unionism in the Capitalist Democracies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). and labor is not allied with an explicitly social democratic party as is true in virtually all other capitalist democracies.Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State (1951; London: Methuen, Ltd., 1964, 20–22; Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Paty Systems: A Framework for Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 1:192; Frances Fox Piven, ed., Labor Parties in Postindustrial Societies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 77–109.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the U.S. federal government expanded the scope and extent of its constitutionally enumerated powers in naturalization, Indian policies, and regulation of interstate commerce. In doing so, Congress became more involved with matters of citizenship, both in defining public purposes and national identity. Citizenship had traditionally been a matter for the states, where governance rested on the features of differentiation, jurisdictional autonomy, and local control. The entry of the federal government and the federal constitutional norms of citizenship might have been expected to bring an overarching coherence to the fundamental liberal values that were declared after the Civil War. Under expanded federal power and federal citizenship, however, multiple traditions of both liberal rights of citizenship and illiberal conditions of status continued, and illiberal positions gained new footing.

Proceeding inductively, starting with three standard examples of major constitutional change, this short essay offers a theory of the Constitution, derived from its historical imposition on the criminal law. The theory proposes to unite constitutional provision, structure, and operations within a single framework over time.

This narrative demonstrates how public and private power interacted during the post–World War II era to create America's unique health care system, a system based on a high-cost, corporate model financed and managed by insurance companies. The article compares the divergent political, organizational, and economic strategies of the American Medical Association (AMA), which represented physicians, and the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA), which represented for-profit insurance firms. Even after the defeat of President Harry Truman's plan for a universal, government-managed system, policymakers in both parties attempted to reform the health care market, because most observers recognized that the embryonic insurance-company-funded model had inherent cost problems. In order to defeat numerous reform proposals, AMA and HIAA leaders allied to rapidly develop the market around insurance-company financing. Insurers and physicians constructed overlapping institutions to manage their increasingly close financial relationship, thus creating a pseudocorporate arrangement. In an attempt to control costs, insurance companies expanded their function beyond simply underwriting the risks associated with medical services consumption to also assuming a supervisory role, albeit distant, over health care delivery. When policymakers designed Medicare, they adopted the organizational framework that private health interests had already created, thereby legitimizing the previously contested high-cost model.

The NOMINATE algorithm has become the most important analytical tool used in the study of the United States Congress. As such, congressional scholars have developed a great many social conventions, practices, and assumptions that enable interpretation of the statistical artifacts the algorithm produces. However, as many of these scholars recognize, serious problems emerge whenever we try to translate these statistical artifacts into language and thus attempt to assign them meaning in historical analysis. These problems are irresolvable because they reside in the very construction of the algorithm itself.

This article examines the origins and influence of ideological index scores—where liberal and conservative interest groups rate legislator performance on selected roll call votes. Two such groups founded in the mid-twentieth century—the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the Americans for Constitutional Action (ACA)—were crucial to the development of this type of metric, transforming roll call analysis from detailed tabular scorecards into streamlined percentage scores showing how often a lawmaker voted “right.” ADA and ACA scores have been heavily utilized in political science as proxies for liberalism and conservatism and used to demonstrate the growing polarization of the congressional parties. Archival evidence suggests, however, that those scores were intended to create the very phenomenon they have been used to measure. They were deeply political rather than objective metrics, which the ADA and ACA used to guide their electoral activities in accordance with an increasingly partisan strategic plan. Each group directed campaign resources toward incumbent lawmakers they rated highly, but they did so unevenly—with the ADA favoring liberal Democrats over Republicans and the ACA showing a preference for conservative Republicans over time. By rewarding favored lawmakers in their preferred party, and using scores to highlight and discourage ideological outliers, they hoped to reshape the parties along more distinct and divided ideological lines—to create more “responsible” parties, as prominent political scientists then desired.

This article analyzes the emergence of national public health capacity in the United States. Tracing the transformation of the federal government's role in public health from the 1910s through the emergence of the CDC during World War II, I argue that national public health capacity emerged, to a great extent, out of the attempts of government officials to deal with the problem of tropical disease within the southern United States during periods of mobilization for war.

Institutional survival can be a concern for any organization, but for long-standing and well-established institutions such as major political parties survival is usually taken for granted. When a party suffers crushing defeat in a national election, alarmist journalists may attract attention with head-lines suggesting its imminent demise, but not since the Civil War has the viability of the Democrats and Republicans been seriously in question. Therefore, the conditions under which a major party maintains itself has not been a focus of scholarship regarding American political parties.