On August 10, 1993, President Bill Clinton signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, one of the largest fiscal deficit-reduction packages in US fiscal history. This law raised the top individual income tax rate from 31% to 39.6%, which increased the average effective tax rate for high-income earners and shifted the federal fiscal balance from deficit to surplus by the end of the century. Given major business interest groups’ criticism of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993’s heavy reliance on tax increases over spending cuts, how was the Democrat-controlled Congress able to pass this legislation? Drawing on archival evidence from the Clinton Presidential Library, this paper shows that the administration and Democratic committee chairs mobilized support from corporate CEOs, including Fortune 500 executives, asking them to lobby key legislators to support the bill. Thus, with business leaders’ support and lobbying efforts, the legislation was passed with a very slight majority.

The year 1975 marked a watershed year for Spanish-surnamed people in the United States and their relationship with the federal government. In that year Congress extended the Voting Rights Act to include a “language minority” category, requiring federal election officials to translate election materials under certain conditions. By validating language rights for language minorities, Congress expanded federal voting protections far beyond African Americans. Advocates for Spanish speakers took up the cause before Congress, which created a new federally protected category based on the long history of discrimination in education and society they collected in testimonies. These language protections catered largely to Spanish speakers, though the category also included Alaska Natives, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. The process of gaining a separate language minority status is explored in this article, which explains how Congress chose to create a law that included Spanish speakers by name.

In 1929, Congress passed a law capping the US House of Representatives at 435 seats, delegating the power to reapportion to the Executive Branch, and empowering state legislatures to redistrict with few federal limitations. The 1929 law was a compromise after nearly ten years of squabbling over how to apportion pursuant to the 1920 Census. In this article, we consider the apportionment debates of the 1920s both to better understand the politics of the era and to draw lessons that might apply to a potential reapportionment debate today. Throughout the decade, partisanship and political self-interest structured members’ votes on reapportionment. The legislation that eventually passed resulted from a compromise that greatly empowered state legislatures to redistrict freely by removing federal requirements that had been in effect since the 1870s, effectively shifting the battle over congressional representation from one over reapportionment in Congress to one over redistricting in the states.

Not long after the 1966 enactment of Medicare and Medicaid, evidence emerged that unscrupulous physicians and health care organizations were gaming the system. Research over the past 50 years shows that around 10 percent of the federal government’s annual cost for these programs is attributed to fraudulent claims or abuses where hospitals and treatments have been overused for undue provider profit. This article examines early congressional attention to this problem and describes lawmakers’ attempts to find legislative solutions to it. It historicizes the dilemma of balancing the ideological limits of government regulation with cultural assumptions about professional self-regulation, focusing on a major 1972 law, the Professional Standards Review Organization (PSRO) Act. The law launched a 10-year career for PSROs, physician-staffed peer-review boards designed to identify and sanction efforts to overcharge Medicare. The article contextualizes multiple actors’ concerns over cost containment and the crisis of faith in medical authority that persisted following failures to control professional malfeasance.

Although state constitutional conventions in the United States were once called frequently and brought about significant changes in governance, recent decades have seen little convention activity. I examine the contrast between the earlier regularity of conventions and their recent absence, but from a different perspective than is usually taken—not by explaining the recent absence but rather explaining the regularity from the 1770s through 1970s. I investigate why legislatures in prior eras agreed to call conventions and how legislators’ traditional opposition to conventions was overcome on a regular basis. After identifying the state constitutional conventions held in the US and setting aside conventions that were called to join, leave, or rejoin the Union or were instigated by institutions other than legislatures, I focus on 82 conventions called at the discretion of legislators and for reasons unrelated to joining, leaving, or rejoining the Union. I identify the issues and circumstances that were responsible for legislators’ willingness to overcome their traditional opposition to holding conventions, thereby contributing to a better understanding of both the challenges in calling conventions and the occasions when these challenges can be overcome.

This article examines Rockefeller Republicanism and its status within the Republican Party by looking at the evolution of Nelson Rockefeller’s support for social welfare policy between 1958 and 1975. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller regularly appears in histories of modern conservatism as the embodiment of the liberalism that conservatives rejected, but these works rarely account for the entirety of Rockefeller’s career. Rather than focus on Rockefeller’s challenges to the national Republican Party in 1960 and 1964, which results in an incomplete representation of Rockefeller Republicanism, this article reassesses moderate Republicanism’s perceived dominance and Rockefeller’s advocacy for liberal domestic policies and commitment to racial liberalism in New York. A full account of Rockefeller’s struggles to find common ground with conservative New York Republicans and adoption of conservative positions related to law enforcement and welfare reform thwarted one of the GOP’s best opportunities to assemble a multiracial and cross-class constituency.

Equating the U.S. government with the national government, historians of the AIDS epidemic have hitherto ignored the role of the states in shaping the early policy response to the disease. Responding to this historiographical lacuna, this article argues that California acted as a policy innovator during the initial years of the epidemic, intervening more effectively than the federal government in the areas of AIDS health care, antibody testing, and prevention education. California’s policy leadership drew significant impetus from a group of gay policy makers, who entered state employment in the early 1980s and relied extensively on clandestine and illicit strategies, particularly a network of “closeted” bureaucrats. Charting the career arcs of these gay policy makers shines a spotlight on the organizational growth of state LGBTQ groups in the 1980s and the evolving role of the “closet” in the modern gay rights movement.