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Measured by any yardstick, it is hard to think that the first impeachment of President Donald Trump was particularly successful. But there are important broader questions raised particularly by the first Trump impeachment that have significance for how we think about the impeachment power moving forward. If future impeachment efforts are to be more successful, or even useful, Congress will have to understand the nature of the constitutional task that it is undertaking. As the House contemplates making use of the impeachment power and the Senate contemplates whether to convict an officer in an impeachment trial, there are some basic questions that must be asked in any impeachment episode. What is an impeachable offense? Is this kind of behavior impeachable? Does this instance of misconduct justify impeachment? It should not have been hard for the House to answer the first two questions in regard to the first Trump impeachment. The third question was the more challenging to answer, and the House struggled to answer it. This Article argues that abusing the powers of the presidency for the sake of purely personal interests is well within the traditional scope of the impeachment power. In order to assess whether an officer has abused power in that way, members of Congress must take care to deliberate across the political aisle so as to identify and resolve possible good-faith explanations for an officer's behavior. A House that does not bother to curb its own partisan instincts risks abusing its own constitutional authority by rushing headlong into an impeachment that does not meet the constitutional standard of high crimes and misdemeanors. Even after the House and the Senate have come to an understanding of the scope of impeachable offenses and each has satisfied itself that an officer has committed deeds that fall within that scope, they must still decide whether an impeachment and a conviction and removal is warranted. Those decisions are necessarily political judgments about what risks the country faces and how they are best navigated. If Congress is to contemplate pursuing an impeachment, it should have a clear view of what it is trying to accomplish and why impeachment is the best path to getting there., TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT 835 TABLE OF CONTENTS 836 I. INTRODUCTION 837 II. WHAT IS AN IMPEACHABLE OFFENSE? 840 III. IS THIS KIND OF BEHAVIOR IMPEACHABLE? 848 IV. DOES THIS [...]

Repugnant Laws makes use of the Judicial Review of Congress database, a new, original, and publicly accessible database cataloging every case in which the U.S. Supreme Court substantially reviewed the constitutionality of the application of a provision of a federal statute. In doing so, it seeks to shed new light on how the Court has navigated the ever-changing political environment and how it has constrained, and empowered, Congress across American history. This still leaves a great deal of our constitutional landscape to be explored. Repugnant Laws provides only a passing glance at how the Court has interacted with the executive branch and the extent to which it has been an ally or foe of presidential power and particular presidents. This historical investigation also raises questions about the extent to which the Court has entered a new political era. Political battles over the federal judiciary have intensified in recent years, but it is not evident that the Court is a more significant political force now than it was in the past. Like many aspects of our modern politics, the Court has become a useful symbol in the culture war that can help heat up political passions and mobilize political activists, even if the stakes for public policy remain relatively small., TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 364 I. JOSEPH STORY AND THE POLITICS OF JUDICIAL REVIEW 365 II. THE EXECUTIVE AS AN ADDITIONAL VARIABLE 368 III. WHAT DOES MITCH MCCONNELL KNOW? 371 [...]

We might reasonably think that both descriptive and normative legitimacy for a court that interprets a constitution and rules on the validity of deeply controversial issues of public policy are rooted in such neutral factors as whether judges are acting in good faith and constructing arguments using recognized legal modalities. Unfortunately, in a highly polarized, partisan environment, such efforts at neutral decisionmaking are likely to be dismissed by partisan opponents, and judicial decisions are likely to be evaluated by the cruder metric of substantive alignment with the observer's own policy preferences. In an era of polarized politics, even judges deliberating in good faith may come to be perceived as illegitimate if they reach the 'wrong' conclusions about high-profile, contentious constitutional issues., TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 227 I. PRACTICE-BASED CONSTITUTIONAL LAW 228 II. POLARIZED POLITICS AND PRACTICE-BASED CONSTITUTIONAL LAW 232 INTRODUCTION Judicial legitimacy is not easy to maintain. Professor Richard Fallon's Law [...]

Sustaining a climate that encourages free speech and free inquiry is a persistent challenge in the university setting, just as it is in society more broadly. Appropriate institutional protections and policies can help protect against the censorious suppression of unorthodox views, but the problem of self-censorship by faculty and students alike might be a harder problem to solve. Creating safeguards so that dissenters from local orthodoxies do not fear reprisals is only a first step toward reducing the temptation to self-censorship. Constructing a pluralistic intellectual environment and nurturing a culture of critical dialogue and skeptical inquiry will help draw out a more robust exchange of ideas., Author(s): Keith E. Whittington [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.16750.35, 0000 0001 2097 5006, Department of Politics, Princeton University, , 08544, Princeton, NJ, USA The threats to free speech are many [...]

The nondelegation doctrine is dead. It is difficult to think of a more frequently repeated or widely accepted legal conclusion. For generations, scholars have maintained that the doctrine was cast [...]

ABSTRACT During the Bush presidency, presidential signing statements became briefly controversial. The controversy has faded, but the White House continues to issue statements when signing legislation. Those statements frequently point [...]

ABSTRACT Not too many years ago, scholars could reasonably speak of the U.S. Supreme Court as being among the most activist in American history. Both empirical and normative scholarship was [...]