How Democracies Die
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“playing for keeps”: Mark Tushnet, “Constitutional Hardball,” The John Marshall Law Review 37 (2004), pp. 550, 523–53.
“malfeasance” as grounds for impeachment: Page, Perón, p. 165.
authority to issue decrees: Delia Ferreria Rubio and Matteo Gorreti, “When the President Governs Alone: The Decretazo in Argentina, 1989–1993,” in Executive Decree Authority, eds. John M. Carey and Matthew Soberg Shugart (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Menem showed no such restraint: Ferreria Rubio and Gorreti, “When the President Governs Alone,” pp. 33, 50.
congress passed an amnesty law: “Venezuela’s Supreme Court Consolidates President Nicolás Maduro’s Power,” New York Times, October 12, 2016; “Supremo de Venezuela declara constitucional el Decreto de Emergencia Económica,” El País, January 21, 2016. See http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2016/01/21/america/1453346802_377899.html.
The chavista court: “Venezuela Leaps Towards Dictatorship,” The Economist, March 31, 2017; “Maduro podrá aprobar el presupuesto a espaldas del Parlamento,” El País, October 13, 2016. See http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2016/10/13/america/1476370249_347078.html; “Venezuela’s Supreme Court Consolidates President Nicolás Maduro’s Power,” New York Times, October 12, 2016; “Supremo de Venezuela declara constitucional el Decreto de Emergencia Económica,” El País, January 21, 2016. See http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2016/01/21/america/1453346802_377899.html.
“all the laws it has approved”: “Radiografía de los chavistas que controlan el TSJ en Venezuela,” El Tiempo, August 29, 2016. See http://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/latinoamerica/perfil-de-los-jueces-del-tribunal-supremo-de-justicia-de-venezuela-44143.
few friends in congress: Lev Marsteintredet, Mariana Llanos, and Detlef Nolte, “Paraguay and the Politics of Impeachment,” Journal of Democracy 42, no. 4 (2013), p. 113.
removed from office by the senate: Marsteintredet, Llanos, and Nolte, “Paraguay and the Politics of Impeachment,” pp. 112–14.
“obvious farce”: Francisco Toro, “What’s in a Coup?,” New York Times, June 29, 2012.
it was legal: Article 225 of Paraguay’s 1992 Constitution allows Congress to impeach the president for “poor performance of his duties,” a “willfully vague formulation that could mean almost anything that two-thirds of sitting senators want it to mean.” See Toro, “What’s in a Coup?”
“The Crazy One”: Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 26.
milk named after himself: Carlos De la Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America, Second Edition (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010), p. 106; Pérez-Liñán, Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America, p. 155.
In a clear violation: See De la Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America, p. 102; Ximena Sosa, “Populism in Ecuador: From José M. Velasco to Rafael Correa,” in Populism in Latin America, Second Edition, ed. Michael L. Conniff (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012), pp. 172–73; and Pérez-Liñán, Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America, p. 26.
“in a perfectly legal way”: Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, pp. 134–36.
“cycle of escalating constitutional brinksmanship”: Nelson, “Are We on the Verge of the Death Spiral That Produced the English Revolution of 1642–1649?” Also Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism,” and Helmke, Institutions on the Edge.
“spiral of legislative obstruction”: Nelson, “Are We on the Verge of the Death Spiral That Produced the English Revolution of 1642–1649?”
vibrant democratic norms: See Arturo Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Chile (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 13–20.
“culture of compromise”: Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), pp. 21–22. Also Luis Maira, “The Strategy and Tactics of the Chilean Counterrevolution in the Area of Political Institutions,” in Chile at the Turning Point: Lessons of the Socialist Years, 1970–1973, eds. Federico Gil, Ricardo Lagos, and Henry Landsberger (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1979), p. 247.
“There was no argument”: Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, p. 21.
strained by Cold War polarization: Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, pp. 22–39.
bourgeois anachronism: Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, p. 25.
into another Cuba: Youssef Cohen, Radicals, Reformers, and Reactionaries: The Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Collapse of Democracy in Latin America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 100.
“gigantic campaign of hatred”: Rodrigo Tomic, “Christian Democracy and the Government of the Unidad Popular,” in Chile at the Turning Point: Lessons of the Socialist Years, 1970–1973, eds. Federico Gil, Ricardo Lagos, and Henry Landsberger, p. 232.
committed to democracy: Paul Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964–1976 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), p. 18; Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, p. 45.
by any means necessary: Julio Faúndez, Marxism and Democracy in Chile: From 1932 to the Fall of Allende (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 181.
Abandoning forbearance: Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, p. 48; Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende, p. 111.
Statute of Guarantees: Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende, pp. 118–20; Faúndez, Marxism and Democracy in Chile, pp. 188–90.
“breakdown in mutual understanding”: Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, p. 49.
Lacking a legislative majority: Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, pp. 50–60, 81; Ricardo Israel, Politics and Ideology in Allende’s Chile (Tempe: Arizona State University Center for Latin American Studies, 1989), pp. 210–16.
“legal loopholes”: Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende, p. 133; Cohen, Radicals, Reformers, and Reactionaries, pp. 104–5.
“institutional checkmate”: Maira, “The Strategy and Tactics of the Chilean Counterrevolution,” pp. 249–56.
it would be a weapon: Maira, “The Strategy and Tactics of the Chilean Counterrevolution,” pp. 249–56; Israel, Politics and Ideology in Allende’s Chile, p. 216.
Allende responded by reappointing: Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende, p. 164.
His leftist allies: Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, p. 67; Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, p. 28.
“opening the door to fascism”: Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, pp. 67–77.
“not let Allende score a single goal”: Israel, Politics and Ideology in Allende’s Chile, p. 80.
“constitutional overthrow”: Jorge Tapia Videla, “The Difficult Road to Socialism: The Chilean Case from a Historical Perspective,” in Chile at the Turning Point: Lessons of the Socialist Years, 1970–1973, eds. Federico Gil, Ricardo Lagos, and Henry Landsberger, p. 56; Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende, p. 282; Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, pp. 83–85.
“an illegitimate head of state”: Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, pp. 89–94.
the government was unconstitutional: Cohen, Radicals, Reformers, and Reactionaries, p. 117.
CHAPTER 6: THE UNWRITTEN RULES OF AMERICAN POLITICS
“I shall ask the Congress”: Franklin Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933, The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/froos1.asp.
The Court found large portions: Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 615–16.
Roosevelt’s proposal: Sidney Milkis and Michael Nelson, The American Presidency: Origins and Development,
1776–2014, Seventh Edition (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2016), pp. 378–79.
Roosevelt’s court-packing plan: Noah Feldman, Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices (New York: Twelve, 2010), p. 108.
the Federalists passed: Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System, p. 107.
The act was used: Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), pp. 49–50; Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System, pp. 107–11.
“legal and constitutional step”: Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System, pp. 136, 140; Wood, The Idea of America, p. 246.
“typified the spirit”: Ibid., p. 216.
“many opponents”: Donald B. Cole, Martin Van Buren and the American Political System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 39, 430.
Van Buren’s generation: See Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System, pp. 216–31.
“emotional intensity”: Donald Fehrenbacher, The South and the Three Sectional Crises (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), p. 27.
“raised above the whites”: Quoted in John Niven, John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), p. 325.
“traitors to the Constitution”: Representative Henry M. Shaw, U.S. House of Representatives, April 20, 1858. See https://archive.org/details/kansasquestionsp00shaw; Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, The Life of Robert Toombs (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1913), p. 183.
Antislavery politicians: Representative Thaddeus Stevens, U.S. House of Representatives, February 20, 1850. See https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009570624.
Yale historian Joanne Freeman: Joanne B. Freeman, “Violence Against Members of Congress Has a Long, and Ominous, History,” Washington Post, June 15, 2017. Also see Joanne B. Freeman, The Field of Blood: Congressional Violence and the Road to Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).
President Lincoln famously suspended: Milkis and Nelson, The American Presidency, pp. 212–13.
The sheer destruction: Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 61.
then–political science professor Woodrow Wilson: Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1885).
“Every man that tried”: Robert Green Ingersoll, Fifty Great Selections, Lectures, Tributes, After Dinner Speeches (New York: C. P. Farrell, 1920), pp. 157–58.
the Republican Congress reduced: Horwill, The Usages of the American Constitution, p. 188.
“high misdemeanor”: Keith Whittington, “Bill Clinton Was No Andrew Johnson: Comparing Two Impeachments,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 2 no. 2 (May 2000), pp. 438–39.
“fold up the bloody shirt”: Charles Calhoun, From Bloody Shirt to Full Dinner Pail: The Transformation of Politics and Governance in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), p. 88.
The pact effectively ended: C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Boston: Little, Brown and Company), 1966.
polarization gradually declined: Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), p. 10.
Bipartisan cooperation enabled: Kimberly Morgan and Monica Prasad, “The Origins of Tax Systems: A French American Comparison,” American Journal of Sociology 114, no. 5 (2009), p. 1366.
In his two-volume masterpiece: James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan and Company, 1896), pp. 393–94.
It is virtually silent: Howell, Power Without Persuasion, pp. 13–14.
the executive branch has built up: Arthur Schlesinger, The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, [1973] 2004); Crenson and Ginsberg, Presidential Power; Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic; Milkis and Nelson, The American Presidency; Chris Edelson, Power Without Constraint: The Post-9/11 Presidency and National Security (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016).
“constitutional battering ram”: Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic, pp. 87–119; Crenson and Ginsberg, Presidential Power, pp. 180–351; Edelson, Power Without Constraint.
Presidents who find their agenda stalled: William Howell, “Unitary Powers: A Brief Overview,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2005), p. 417.
presidents can circumvent the judiciary: See James F. Simon, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Secession, and the President’s War Powers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007).
“naturally inspire scrupulousness and caution”: Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 74.
“I walk on untrodden ground”: Quoted in Fred Greenstein, Inventing the Job of President: Leadership Style from George Washington to Andrew Jackson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 9.
He energetically defended: Milkis and Nelson, The American Presidency, p. 91.
He limited his use: Ibid., p. 82.
“signed many bills”: Quoted in ibid., p. 82.
Washington was also reluctant: Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, “Executive Orders,” The American Presidency Project, eds. John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, Santa Barbara, CA, 1999–2017. Available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/orders.php.
“gained power from his readiness”: Gary Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), p. 23.
“If any single person”: Gordon Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (New York: Penguin, 2006), pp. 30–31. Also see Seymour Martin Lipset, “George Washington and the Founding of Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 9, no. 4 (October 1998), pp. 24–36.
stewardship theory: Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 243–44.
“boundless energy and ambition”: Quoted in Milkis and Nelson, The American Presidency, pp. 125–27.
“Don’t you realize”: Quoted in ibid., p. 125.
Roosevelt acted with surprising restraint: Ibid., p. 128.
He took great care: Sidney Milkis and Michael Nelson, The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776–2007, Fifth Edition (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2008), p. 217.
Roosevelt operated well within: Ibid., pp. 289–90.
presidents abided by established norms: Crenson and Ginsberg, Presidential Power, p. 211; Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic, p. 87.
They never used pardons: Lauren Schorr, “Breaking the Pardon Power: Congress and the Office of the Pardon Attorney,” American Criminal Law Review 46 (2009), pp. 1535–62.
“ardent Federalist”: Alexander Pope Humphrey, “The Impeachment of Samuel Chase,” The Virginia Law Register 5, no. 5 (September 1889), pp. 283–89.
Jefferson pushed for his impeachment: Ellis, American Sphinx, p. 225.
“political persecution from beginning to end”: Humphrey, “The Impeachment of Samuel Chase,” p. 289. Historian Richard Hofstadter describes Chase’s impeachment as an “act of partisan warfare, pure and simple” (Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System, p. 163).
The Senate acquitted Chase: Lee Epstein and Jeffrey A. Segal, Advice and Consent: The Politics of Judicial Appointment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 31.
Beginning with the Federalists’ move: The seven instances are these: 1) In 1800, when the lame-duck Federalist Congress reduced the Court from 6 to 5 to limit Jefferson’s ability to shape the judiciary; 2) In 1801, when the newly installed Jeffersonian Congress restored the Court’s size from 5 to 6; 3) In 1807, when Congress expanded the Court to 7 to give Jefferson an additional appointment; 4) In 1837, when Congress expanded the Court to 9 to give Andrew Jackson two additional appointments; 5) In 1863, when Congress expanded the Court to 10 to
grant Lincoln an additional antislavery justice; 6) In 1866, when the Republican-dominated Congress reduced the Court to 7 to limit Democratic President Andrew Johnson’s ability to shape the Court; 7) In 1869, when the Congress expanded the Court to 9 to give newly elected Republican President Ulysses S. Grant two additional appointments. See Jean Edward Smith, “Stacking the Court,” New York Times, July 26, 2007.
“such outrages”: Woodrow Wilson, An Old Master and Other Political Essays (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893), p. 151.
“is very tempting to partisans”: Benjamin Harrison, This Country of Ours (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), p. 317.
“strong enough to prohibit”: Horwill, The Usages of the American Constitution, p. 190.
“extraordinary in its hubris”: Lee Epstein and Jeffrey A. Segal, Advice and Consent: The Politics of Judicial Appointment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 46.
“open declaration of war”: Quoted in H. W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Doubleday, 2008), pp. 470–71.
“a step toward making himself dictator”: Quoted in Feldman, Scorpions, p. 108.
“change the meaning”: Brands, Traitor to His Class, p. 472.
“The whole mess smells of Machiavelli”: Gene Gressley, “Joseph C. O’Mahoney, FDR, and the Supreme Court,” Pacific Historical Review 40, no. 2 (1971), p. 191.
“masterly retreat”: Morison and Commager, The Growth of the American Republic, p. 618.
It developed a range of tools: Gregory Koger, Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Gregory J. Wawro and Eric Schickler, Filibuster: Obstruction and Lawmaking in the U.S. Senate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
the Senate lacked any rules: Wawro and Schickler, Filibuster, p. 6.