In 1812, the courts were again thrust into the center of international conflict. Decades of resentment over British domination prompted the United States to embark upon what many Americans thought of as the nation’s “second war for independence.” It was one the United States was unprepared to fight. Longstanding distrust of permanent military establishments left the nation unable to counter British armed might, especially on the water. Privateers were a potential solution, but Congress and the Madison administration were unequal to the task of regulating the United States’ private navy. Responsibility fell to the judiciary, even though Jeffersonians had spent the previous decade attacking the courts for their supposed undermining of republican principles. As the revolutionary generation had learned, judicial enforcement of the laws of maritime war was critical to maintaining the nation’s international credibility. And the courts’ disposition of ships and goods captured by American privateers kept the nation’s war machine running. By marrying government authority to private enterprise, judges made it possible for the United States to reassert its standing as a sovereign and independent nation.

Chapter 3 explores the work undertaken by Carl Byoir and Ivy Lee for German interests, the subsequent Congressional investigation into that work, and the public backlash that followed. Byoir and Associates worked for the German Tourist Information Office, while Lee worked for I. G. Farben. These connections to Nazi Germany quickly came to the attention of the US government. Congress investigated potential subversive activities and conflicts of interest between private PR interests and America’s broader national interests. While neither Byoir nor Lee was revealed as a puppet of the Nazi regime, both were tainted by the association. The incident revealed the depth of popular concerns about the use of PR to promote foreign interests in the United States.

This chapter explores the idea of opposition. One may make known one’s opposition to specific measures and one may make known one’s opposition to those who hold the office of government. While opposition to those who rule may flourish only in constitutional arrangements that contemplate changes in government, the freedom to make known opposition to measures may obtain and flourish even absent such arrangements. These two different modalities of opposition – to measures and to governments – draw on a reciprocal understanding that those who oppose and those who rule are both committed to the public good. Depending on the design of its system of government, a constitution may enable or empower opposition, with the parliamentary form of government differing in important respects from the presidential. Some constitutional arrangements and proposals award to opposition members in legislatures and elsewhere some degree of authority in exercising the office of government. Whatever the merits of such coalition or consensus arrangements and proposals, they change the function of opposition, for when those who oppose begin to govern, a version of the question quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who guards the guardians) arises: who stands in opposition to the opposition?

This chapter explores a double shift in social policy from the late 1990s to the mid 2010s. Firstly, under the Atal Behari Vajpayee-led NDA governments (1998-99; 1999-2004) contributory social insurance was extended to reach labour market ‘outsiders’, who worked in the informal sector without access to the social insurance enjoyed by formal sector workers. This policy shift was intended to support wider labour law reforms by sidelining the political power of organised labour. As the sustainability of India’s new economic model came under scrutiny, a second shift took place under the Congress-led UPA government (2004-14) in which non-employment-linked social assistance programmes were recognised for the first time - at least in theory - as permanent, statutory rights or entitlements of citizenship. The chapter ends by examining the centrality of states to social policy implementation. It shows that by 2014 the typical subnational welfare regime combined high levels of labour commodification with publicly financed social assistance. This reflected the embrace of labour informalisation on the one hand, and the provision of direct, publicly financed social assistance on the other.

In the 1980s, two groups of physicists in Europe and America began to lay plans for a high energy proton accelerator that could settle the question of electroweak symmetry breaking. In 1984, Weinberg is appointed to the SSC Board of Overseers, and this work would occupy his time for much of the next decade. Weinberg testifies before Congress in favor of the SSC project and starts to appreciate the role of pork-barrel politics in the siting decisions. The Texas site of Waxahachie, near Dallas, is approved in 1988. The project’s construction funding is approved but faces ongoing challenges from other competing areas of science. Changes in the specifications, required by the science goals, lead to increases in the costs, resulting in bad press. In 1993, the funding was cut, and the SSC was killed off. Weinberg writes a successful trade book, Dreams of a Final Theory.

The Introduction sets the stage by describing the intense focus on abusive tax avoidance and tax evasion by the rich among political figures, legal scholars, and the general public. The Introduction also describes the stakes for the tax system in addressing high-end tax noncompliance. It then provides an overview of two conventional approaches to the problem of high-end tax noncompliance: increasing IRS funding and “activity-based rules” targeting specific strategies that enable tax avoidance and evasion. The Introduction describes the book’s argument that both of these responses are incomplete solutions. It then describes the overlooked role that tax compliance rules – which govern critical aspects of tax administration and enforcement but that currently apply to all taxpayers without regard to their income or wealth – play in enabling tax avoidance and evasion by the rich. The Introduction provides a summary of the core argument and contribution of the book: that policymakers should introduce a system of means-based adjustments to the tax compliance rules for high-end taxpayers.

In the two decades after 1975, over 1 million Vietnamese resettled in the United States. New resettlement programs arose not only in 1975 with the fall of Saigon and in the years immediately thereafter, but also in 1979, 1982, 1984, 1987, 1989, and 1996. These initiatives resulted from unilateral US policies, multilateral programs organized under the auspices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, bilateral programs negotiated between Washington and Hanoi, and, often, a combination of the three. This chapter explores how the Vietnamese diaspora influenced the American approach to normalization with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV). It argues that normalization was a protracted process that unfolded over decades and that negotiating and implementing migration programs was a central part of the that process. The US approach to post-1975 US–SRV relations saw significant input from nonexecutive actors. Nonstate actors provided information and political pressure, and created close relationships with elected officials outside the White House, especially members of Congress. These groups, the actions of first-asylum nations, and other transnational forces combined to make negotiating and implementing migration programs a US priority. The contact, cooperation, and compromise that process required normalized US–Vietnamese relations, despite US assertions to the contrary.

The introduction chapter lays the groundwork for understanding the intricate relationship between Congress and information acquisition, particularly through committee hearings and witness testimonies. Highlighting the pivotal role of information in shaping legislative decisions, the chapter probes into the challenges faced by Congress in navigating the complex landscape of external expertise within a politically charged environment. The chapter delves into the critical questions driving the book’s exploration: How does Congress acquire information, and what factors influence the selection and content of information provided by external witnesses? It introduces the overarching themes of partisan incentives, institutional conditions, and the strategic nature of information acquisition, aiming to dissect their impact on legislative processes. By providing a comprehensive overview of the book’s scope, methodology, and key theoretical insights, the introduction sets the tone for a deep dive into the dynamics of congressional information-seeking behavior.

Throughout the long period of American involvement in Vietnam, Washington officials often justified US intervention by referring to the domino theory. Even before President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally articulated the theory in 1954, civilian as well as military analysts had set out a version of the theory, linking the outcome in Indochina to a chain reaction of regional and global effects. Defeat in Vietnam, they warned, would have calamitous consequences not merely for that country but for the rest of Southeast Asia and perhaps beyond. Over time, US officials moved to a less mechanistic, more psychological version of the theory. Credibility was the new watchword, as policymakers declared it essential to stand firm in Vietnam in order to demonstrate American determination to defend its vital interests not only in the region but around the world. But it was not only American credibility on the world stage that mattered; also at stake, officials feared, was their own and their party’s credibility at home. This chapter examines these permutations of the domino theory, with particular focus on the crucial 1964–5 period under Lyndon B. Johnson.

Superficially, the Vietnam War might seem a high point of congressional resistance to the Cold War consensus. After all, two consecutive presidents, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, faced ferocious criticism as they expanded the US military commitment in Southeast Asia. Yet for most of the Johnson and Nixon years, Congress was mostly reacting to executive decisions, and struggled to stop either the escalation of the war under Johnson or its expansion under Nixon. Ironically, perhaps the best chance for Congress to influence Vietnam policy came before a significant commitment of US combat forces, during the Kennedy administration. Yet for a combination of ideological and tactical reasons, members of both the House and the Senate who might have been inclined to challenge the administration’s approach to Vietnam declined to do so in a meaningful way.

Primaries may contribute to polarization in other ways than a selective effect emanating from voters. This chapter tests a second potential mechanism of polarization, where incumbent members of Congress may respond to being challenged in a primary by adopting more liberal or conservative voting patterns in subsequent congresses. To test incumbents’ responses, it uses a series of fixed-effects models, clustered at the representative level, with roll-call movement as the key dependent variable. When considering the universe of all primary challenges, incumbents do not respond positionally, but when primaries are ideological and factional, they move toward their ideological pole. These effects are larger for factional primaries, indicating that incumbents are most responsive when a primary opponent has the support of an alternative party faction. These effects are larger for Republican than Democratic members of Congress, which is one way in which primaries may contribute to asymmetric polarization. These findings indicate that primaries may matter for polarization because incumbents believe them to be important and so are responsive to them.

Chapter Eight turns to what became a growing preoccupation for Rogers in the 1920s: politics. In his journalistic writing and live appearances, the humorist’s habitual survey of current events and public issues increasingly focused on the tendencies and foibles of American political life. He especially took aim at the pretension, dissembling, selfishness, and pomposity of both political parties and delighted in skewering Congress and various president’s for ineffective or foolish policies. He often described politics as "bunk." Rogers covered Republican and Democratic conventions, interviewed Presidents Harding and Coolidge, and spoke frequently with influential figures such as Bernard Baruch and Al Smith. Throughout, he stood squarely in the tradition of American populism, upholding the interests of average citizens and criticizing the privileges of social and economic elites. Rogers’ own political reputation peaked in 1928, when he was convinced to run a tongue-in-cheek campaign for the presidency.