Members Of Congress Research Articles

Introduction and Executive Summary

Antitrust institutions in the United States and around the world are at a crossroads. Until now, antitrust has been based upon the consumer welfare standard, which has served as the lodestar of modern antitrust for the past 40 years. The hallmark of modern antitrust enforcement has been a case-by-case approach, driven by economic analysis and an evaluation of conduct on the merits. Courts and competition agencies have generally rejected invitations to jettison this successful approach in favor of presumptions of illegality and other shortcuts. The reason is simple: Relying upon presumptions instead of evidence risks rendering unlawful business behavior that in fact benefits consumers. But there is increasingly talk of a revolution that would overthrow the antitrust regime in the United States and, indeed, around the world. The drumbeat for this revolution appears to be strong and growing, with a broad range of enthusiastic participants and followers, including legal academics and economists, public intellectuals, think tankers, prominent members of Congress, and some foreign competition authorities. The would-be revolution has already had some success—at least as measured by the increasing discussion in academia, the popular press, and social media, and having embedded some of its central ideas in the platforms of both major U.S. political parties. Signs of the gathering revolution can also be seen in the various reports on antitrust and the digital economy emanating from around the world, such as those of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition, the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, and other think tanks and governmental bodies. The more radical revolutionaries want an antitrust regime to address a myriad of perceived socio-political problems, including, but not limited to, income inequality, relative wage depression, and the concentration of political power. Some call for incorporating other forms of regulation—particularly regulation of data and privacy—into the antitrust laws and putting them in the hands of the antitrust regulators. Their revolutionary zeal is aimed generally at the digital economy and in particular at large tech firms. Their proposed “fixes” targeting the largest tech firms run the gamut from the reinvigoration of competition rulemaking at the Federal Trade Commission, to shifting the burden of proof from plaintiffs to defendants in antitrust litigation, to extending the reach of antitrust to content moderation decisions, to size-based presumptions akin to the antitrust approach of the 1960s, to creating a new agency with unlimited regulatory power. These proposals have been refined to the point that they are now ripe, in our view, for rigorous examination from an evidence-based perspective.

The contested origins of US democracy promotion: the national endowment for democracy and its congressional critics

In 1983, a compromise between the Reagan administration, members of Congress and private groups led to the establishment of the bipartisan democracy promotion organization: the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Tracing congressional efforts to prevent the formation of the NED, this article offers the first comprehensive, archival-based study of the NED’s critics and their arguments and motivations. I find that opposition to the NED consisted of an unlikely and ideologically diverse alliance between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, who took issue with its organizational structure and strategic objectives. Although Congress eventually established the NED with minor concessions to its critics, its origin was considerably more contested than previously acknowledged. The case of the NED also demonstrates the substantial influence of domestic politics and individual members of Congress on US foreign policymaking.

Can the Penalties for Treason Co-Exist With the Concept of Private Property?

Charles Yorke’s book, Some Considerations on the Law of Forfeiture, for High Treason, is 274 years old. Nevertheless, it has modern relevance. President Trump, prominent members of Congress (e.g., Senator Kamala Harris), and Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing (in an exchange with Senator Lindsey Graham4) have recently discussed law related to treason.

The Speaker of the House and Presidential Succession: An Argument and Addendum

Is Nancy Pelosi, as Speaker of the House of Representatives, properly and constitutionally second in line for the presidency? The question has urgent new relevance in light of President Donald Trump’s recent infection with the coronavirus and the related spread of infections in the top levels of his administration. If a double vacancy occurred due to the death or incapacity of both Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence, who would be next in line?The Presidential Succession Act, passed by Congress 73 years ago, says that Speaker Pelosi would take over as Acting President.But an essay by Professor Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School (co-authored with Ben Miller-Gootnick) claims there is “a powerful (though not airtight) argument” that placing top congressional leaders like Pelosi in the line of succession violates the Constitution. Goldsmith, like many others, relies heavily on a 1995 law review article by Professors Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar.This paper responds to the Goldsmith and Amar articles. It contends that the argument touted by Goldsmith and the Amars is not only “not airtight,” it is not even persuasive. It is stunningly weak. Any challenge to Pelosi in the event of a double-vacancy crisis would be a dangerous and reckless usurpation.The paper argues, in particular (in the addendum expanding on the Jurist essay), that careful readings of the Article VI Oath and Religious Test Clauses, and of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, powerfully support this interpretation of the Constitution and boomerang devastatingly against the argument set forth in the 1995 Amar article.The paper also notes intriguing evidence (addendum, pp. 6-8) that impeachment may have been originally understood to be available for members of Congress.

The electoral effects of closing military bases

ABSTRACT Can members of Congress escape blame for bad news in their districts? To maximise their chances of re-election, legislators seek to maintain their electoral connections with voters, defending key district interests. Could actions by successive presidential administrations over the past three decades to close obsolete military bases have undermined such efforts? Although Congress and the president have deployed Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) commissions to facilitate such closures and insulate individual members of Congress from directly traceable costs of those decisions, the electoral implications of base closures have yet to be fully probed. Focusing on the House of Representatives, I examine all major BRAC closings, and find that major base closures do not affect the electoral fortunes of incumbents. Rather, voters predominantly and typically punish the president’s party and first-term lawmakers during these elections. I conclude that Congressional fears about the electoral costs of base closings are likely unfounded.

Renovabio: Innovation and Sustainability at the New Brazilian Biofuels Policy or The Emperor’s New Clothes?

Biofuel policies are an ongoing matter for both developed and developing countries. Brazil, a giant world producer, has a historical roll of regulations and laws that affect the sector. Nevertheless, studies from a political ecology perspective, which pay attention to the impacts of power relations and discourses in political outcomes are scarce. In this sense, we focus on the National Biofuel Policy (Renovabio), launched in 2017, to analyze discursive coalitions as well as perceptions from social actors settle in a biofuel production territory. We sought to understand contradictions between discourses and practices within Renovabio and how they reproduce traditional Brazilian Biofuel policies. To answer these questions, we used Atlas.ti software to support a content and critical discursive analysis in order to detect distinct perspectives, narratives and interests during Renovabio’s implementation. We draw on: i) statements from stakeholders, lobbyists, and Congress members; ii) Bills, Law Projects and ordinances texts from the special commissions and committees; iii) speeches from plenary sessions occurred on the National Congress; iv) Public Audiences contributions; v) articles from biofuel magazines and specialized websites; and, vi) digital platforms from lobbies and interest groups; We also conducted 24 interviews with community members, farmers, local government officials, civil associations, and industry representatives in the state of Goiás, a large ethanol/ sugar-energy production territory. Results pointed to a strong ecological modernization discourse deployed to justify the rapid policy implementation and to legitimize economic incentives, particularly ecological labeling/certification. Renovabio’s goals, speeches and practices are in many senses contradictory and reproduce problems detected in previous biofuel policies that dim legislative transparency, weakens accountability and tramples society participation and representativeness over biofuel development.

“Do Gun Policy Specifics Matter? Hyper-Polarization And The Decline Of Vote Splitting In Congress”

Abstract By tracing the changing electoral incentives and political circumstances of partisans in Congress over time, this paper unpacks how and why substantive policy content has lost its relevance for influencing Congressional voting on gun control. It argues that as gun control positions have crystallized to become part of partisan identity, policy specifics have come to matter less for partisans in Congress than the general pro gun control or pro gun rights position that a piece of legislation symbolizes. Today, regardless of the specific policy contents of a bill, a gun vote serves as a signaling device from members of Congress to their partisan supporters that they are either passionate defenders of the Second Amendment (Republicans) or fierce protectors of America’s children from gun violence (Democrats). That policy content has lost its relevance for Congressional voting on gun control is evident through the marked decline in vote splitting, the extinction of gun control moderates, and the all or nothing voting behavior of partisan shifters – those formerly pro-control Republicans, anti-control Democrats, and gun control moderates who shifted positions over time to vote the party line.

Will a Burst in Federal Infrastructure Spending Accelerate the Recovery from the COVID-19 Recession?

Facing a highly uncertain and potentially sluggish recovery in a presidential election year, the president has pressed for increased infrastructure spending to boost the economy. If he continues to promote this idea, members of Congress may go along with this policy as a potential way to speed up the recovery. Because the current transportation funding bill is due to expire in September, there will be a window of opportunity to act.A limited number of research papers have carefully examined the impact of government investment spending on highways and other infrastructure since the Great Recession. Published papers have examined the effectiveness of the spending programs embodied in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). I show in this policy brief that the preponderance of evidence suggests that this type of spending does not significantly boost the economy in the short term. In particular, the most likely impact is a spending multiplier that is less than one. This implies that government investment spending reduces, or crowds out, some private spending.

Investigation of Adjuncts Use in J. F. Kennedy’s Speech for the Members of Congress and Diplomatic Corps of Latin America on 13 March 1961

This descriptive qualitative study investigates the types of adjuncts use in a spoken language grammar of J. F. Kennedy’s speech on 13 March 1961. Further, the study does examine the occurrence of each adjunct used in the recording. As it is described, adjuncts are an optional or structurally dispensable part of a sentence, clause, or phrase, when omitted, will not affect the remainder of the sentence being an element of clause structure with an adverbial function. In this current study, the researcher listed fourteen groups of adjuncts in the recording. The theory used to examine this study is stated in Carter & McCarthy’s (2006). The result conveys that the total numbers of adjuncts used in the speech are 75 adjuncts. In which adjuncts of place become the most frequent adjuncts in the speech. Next, focusing adjuncts be the most frequent number two with 14 total occurrences. The data show modal adjuncts could not be identified in the recording.

Are Individuals Harmed by Gerrymandering? Examining Access to Congressional District Offices

Objective: We consider proximity and access to the district offices of members of Congress to explore whether gerrymandering affects individuals’ capacity to be heard and thus impairs their representation. Methods: In a study of six states, we conduct more than 123 million distance measurements to identify residents whose closest district office is in the wrong congressional district. Based on survey results, we then estimate the likelihood that such mismatched individuals will personally visit the office of their member of Congress. Results: We find that in five gerrymandered states between 28.7-47.5 percent of residents have a mismatched closest district office, a rate several times higher than in a non-gerrymandered state. Extrapolating from survey results, we find that mismatched residents are 38 percent less likely to visit their own district office, and that across five states gerrymandering effectively deters nearly 600,000 office visits over a two-year congressional session. Conclusion: Of significance in both the legal and scholarly arena, we find that gerrymandering increases the prevalence of mismatched district offices, thereby impeding constituents from making in-person visits that are widely viewed as the most effective mechanism for communicating their opinions and needs to Congress. We believe this heretofore undocumented mismatch warrants additional scholarly consideration of gerrymandering’s effects on individual’s access to tangible aspects of representation.

Country Image in COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of China.

Country image has a profound influence on international relations and economic development. In the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19, countries and their people display different reactions, resulting in diverse perceived images among foreign public. Therefore, in this article, we take China as a specific and typical case and investigate its image with aspect-based sentiment analysis on a large-scale Twitter dataset. To our knowledge, this is the first study to explore country image in such a fine-grained way. To perform the analysis, we first build a manually-labeled Twitter dataset with aspect-level sentiment annotations. Afterward, we conduct the aspect-based sentiment analysis with BERT to explore the image of China. We discover an overall sentiment change from non-negative to negative in the general public, and explain it with the increasing mentions of negative ideology-related aspects and decreasing mentions of non-negative fact-based aspects. Further investigations into different groups of Twitter users, including U.S. Congress members, English media, and social bots, reveal different patterns in their attitudes toward China. This article provides a deeper understanding of the changing image of China in COVID-19 pandemic. Our research also demonstrates how aspect-based sentiment analysis can be applied in social science researches to deliver valuable insights.

Bioethics training in reproductive health in Mexico.

Bioethical approaches to reproductive health have been of utmost importance for the last three decades in Mexico. As Mexican laws regarding abortion, assisted reproduction, and conscientious objection have been modified, a number of social actors with an interest in these areas have realized that they have to educate the different agents who take part in these procedures in a bioethical approach to reproductive health and rights. This strategy was first used in Mexico by the Catholic Church and many Catholic universities. Advocates, scientists, and feminist organizations, as well as some public universities, have also realized that a grounding in bioethics could help health providers to have an ethical frame that supports the provision of abortion services. Bioethics is also a good framework for supporting the legalization of abortion and for more liberal laws regarding assisted reproduction. So, for the last few years, one of the priorities of these two sides, Catholic and secular groups, has been to train healthcare personnel, lawyers, and members of ethics committees and members of Congress in the application of their respective bioethical perspectives.

Impeaching a Federal Judge: Some Lessons from History

In August 2014, Federal District Judge Mark Fuller was arrested on a charge of misdemeanor battery after his wife called 911 from an Atlanta hotel room and told the operator, “He’s beating on me.” Judge Fuller has agreed to enter a pre-trial diversion program; if he completes the program, the criminal case against him will be dismissed. But Judge Fuller may face other consequences. The Acting Chief Judge of the Eleventh Circuit has initiated proceedings under the federal judicial misconduct statute. And some members of Congress and editorial writers have said that if Judge Fuller does not resign from the bench, Congress should begin impeachment proceedings. Federal judges serve during “good behavior,” and they can be impeached and removed from office only for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” If the domestic-violence charges are substantiated, would that constitute an impeachable offense? In this statement, submitted at a hearing of the Task Force on Judicial Impeachment of the House Judiciary Committee, the author addresses some of the questions raised by a proposal to impeach a federal judge. What is the meaning of the constitutional language? No one argues that Judge Fuller has committed treason or bribery, so the question is whether his conduct falls within the category of “other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The author discusses the evidence from the founding generation and from the commentators, and he briefly surveys the impeachment precedents. These historical materials suggest two broad (and overlapping) categories of conduct that may justify impeachment. The first is serious abuse of power. The second is conduct that demonstrates that an official is “unworthy to fill” the office that he holds. Another question is the relevance of the pending criminal charges. Can the House rely on a criminal conviction as the basis for impeachment? Can the House proceed with impeachment if the criminal charges are dropped? The author concludes that the House must exercise an independent judgment; it is not bound by determinations of other actors in other proceedings. The statement was submitted to the Task Force on Judicial Impeachment at a hearing on the possible impeachment of Judge Samuel B. Kent of the Southern District of Texas. The written statement is followed by supplementary material that includes the author’s oral testimony and the colloquies that followed. Based on the testimony at the hearing and other evidence, the House approved four articles of impeachment. Judge Kent resigned from the bench before his Senate trial.

The Power of Equality? Polarization and Collective Mis-representation on Gay Rights in Congress, 1989–2019

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent application of employment protections to gays and lesbians in Bostock v. Clayton County highlights the striking absence of policy produced by the U.S. Congress despite two decades of increased public support for gay rights. With the notable exceptions of allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the military, and passing hate crimes legislation, every other federal policy advancing gay rights over the last three decades has been the product of a Supreme Court ruling or Executive Order. To better understand the reasons for this inaction, we examine the changing preferences of members of Congress on LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) issues. Examining scores from the Human Rights Campaign from 1989 to 2019, we find a striking polarization by the parties on LGBTQ issues, as Democrats have become much more supportive and Republicans even more opposed to gay rights. This change has been driven not by gerrymandering, mass opinion polarization, or elite backlash, but among Republicans by a mix of both conversion and replacement, and among Democrats primarily of replacement of more moderate members. The result is a striking lack of collective representation that leaves members of the LGBTQ community at risk to the whims of presidents and jurists.

Human Rights Rhetoric and Policy in the Kennedy Administration

With his administration’s shift away from reactionary anti-communism, concern about American support for right-wing dictators, and expressed commitment to welcome nationalist movements rooted in in self-determination, John F. Kennedy had the potential to be the first US president to prioritize human rights abroad. He had spoken out against colonialism and in favor of human rights as a member of Congress and a presidential candidate. In office, however, he yielded to other foreign policy priorities. Analyzing his administration’s record on human rights reveals the Cold War utility of human rights rhetoric and the limits to US support for human rights in these years.

Does partisanship explain spending patterns in congressional bill proposals?

We investigate the motivations driving members of the US Congress to introduce bills that require new federal spending, testing a classic “party matters” hypothesis that spending is motivated by partisanship with Democrats spending more on social programs and Republicans more on defense and social order. To test this hypothesis, we introduce a new dataset that codes Congressional Budget Office reports, allowing us to link cost estimates to over 7,000 congressional bills. Overall, we find very little evidence that partisanship or ideology can reliably predict the cost of bills. Bills introduced by Democrats call for similar levels of new spending as those introduced by Republicans, even on policy topics where partisan divisions are thought to be pronounced. These results raise the possibility that when it comes to spending rank-and-file members are less motivated by abstract partisan commitments than traditionally thought.

NASA Funding in Congress: Money Matters

This paper argues that individual members of Congress engage in economic opportunism, voting in the best interests of their constituents based on economic heuristics, when considering space policy legislation. Multivariable logit analysis is conducted on five votes in the House of Representatives to test the hypotheses. The economic opportunism effect is captured in the models by the presence of NASA Centers, relative importance of space industry and NASA procurements. Findings suggest that economic benefits to a member’s constituency can play an important role in legislative voting, particularly when legislation deals with federal aerospace funding, when space policy bills lack over-reaching bi-partisan support. In recent years the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has seen its funding fall prey to partisan budget battles and party line voting, but this was not historically the norm. As we move forward into a future where NASA funding may become more scrutinized and politicized, this paper supports the thesis that individual members of Congress care more about the funds for their constituents than the other aspects of space policy.

The Political Misuse of Antitrust

The increased importance of antitrust as a campaign issue and a political conversation raises long-standing troubling issues of whether antitrust enforcement (or non-enforcement) can, and is, being used for partisan political purposes. First, there were long standing rumors of White House direction to challenge the ATT-Time Warner merger. Second, the President and other key officials have alleged that social media and tech giants have exhibited a political bias against conservative messages and that antitrust was one way to deal with such alleged abuses. Third, there have been press reports that the head of the Antitrust Division lobbied members of Congress in connection with the settlement of the Sprint-T–Mobile merger investigation and personally sought to broker the divestiture that was accepted to allow the transaction to move forward. Most recently, Congress also has heard recent testimony from a whistle-blower that the Attorney General directed burdensome second requests, over the objection of career staff, to mergers posing few competitive risks in the cannabis industry out of a personal dislike for the industry. These second requests represented 29% of the total second requests during the fiscal year in question. The whistle-blower also raised concerns about the Division’s now-closed investigation — also over the objections of career staff — of car companies lobbying the state of California to maintain state emissions control at a level in excess of what the administration sought to impose at the federal level. This essay begins a long overdue conversation about how the legal system should deal with issues of personal animus or political favoritism in the enforcement of the antitrust laws. We take no position on the merits of any of the current controversies, but instead focus on the broader issue of how animus and bias in the broadest sense should be dealt with, both when cases with some potential merit are brought against perceived enemies and when cases with some potential merit are declined to protect perceived allies. We begin with distinguishing these situations of bias and animus from those of outright corruption and when antitrust considerations are set aside in favor of broader foreign policy and national interests. We then look at the limited tools within antitrust law to deal with issues of bias and political favoritism and survey related areas of the law which have been dealing with these issues more directly throughout their history.

The Abuse of the Pardon Power Prevention Act Would Criminalize Politics

At bottom, this statute would effect a radical change in how the presidency is understood. Historically, the President has been viewed as an independent political actor, with democratic bona fides, who was charged with making discretionary policy judgments. Now, he would be transformed into a slow-moving, process-bound, “nonpartisan” actor. Some readers may praise this change. But we do not think such a change is in the public interest. Of course, the public interest is always contestable because no one has the institutional knowledge or widely accepted power to declare a monopoly on what is in the common good. The President should be able to make important decisions with vigor, independence, and dispatch. This proposed bill would alter the presidency such that he would now second-guess his official actions for fear of prosecution. Federal prosecutors should not be authorized to dictate what is in the public interest. Many people who read this bill may not realize its likely consequences. Others can foresee these consequences, and approve of them, because they seek to transform the presidency. All should recognize that the consequences of this bill, if enacted, will extend far beyond President Trump, or even a President Biden. The presidency has far less to fear from this bill than the 535 members of Congress would. Indeed, our concerns apply more forcefully to Congress, which does not control the apparatus of federal prosecution. In December 2019, we wrote: Consider a third hypothetical in which personal and public motivations are inextricably intertwined. Two members of Congress are engaged in negotiations about a bill. Each agrees to support the bill only after it is amended to provide $1 billion in additional spending in their respective districts. They each have mixed motives. First, they believe that the extra $1 billion will help improve the welfare of their districts—which is part of the public good, as they conceive it. Second, they understand that bringing home the bacon will help their reelection campaigns. “All politics is local,” the old adage goes. The run-of-the-mill horse-trading described in this example might be bad policy and, arguably, is a misuse of discretion. But whatever else it is, it is not bribery. If we’re wrong, almost every member of Congress could be indicted under the federal bribery statute. Indeed, if every such deal or compromise is a presumptive crime, then the Department of Justice will have the power to investigate every set of political compromises that accrue on nearly all major spending bills. Such a theory of bribery would allow the department to investigate, and later indict and seek to convict, members of Congress involved in political compromise and log-rolling. We should resist efforts to criminalize politics. This bill may seem like a prudent idea in the current moment. But the bill criminalizes normal politics; it will end with criminalizing political speech. Do critics of the current President really want to give Attorney General Bill Barr the power to prosecute congressional log-rolling? Be careful what you wish for.

Understanding congressional coalitions: A discourse network analysis of congressional hearings for the Every Student Succeeds Act

The purpose of this study is to investigate policy coalitions of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) at U.S. congressional hearings. This study is grounded in the advocacy coalition framework, which argues that advocacy coalitions are forged by policy actors who have similar policy preferences. To identify the coalitions, according to the policy claims articulated by policy actors, discourse network analysis was performed to examine 30 testimonies in the congressional hearings on ESSA since its passage in 2015. The policy actors fall into eight categories: (1) federal administrative and executive offices, (2) state administrative and executive offices, (3) teachers unions, (4) interest groups, (5) superintendents, (6) teacher, (7) education professor, and (8) Congress members. The results of discourse network analysis suggest four coalitions based on the actors’ policy claims on (1) equity, (2) assessment and accountability, (3) states have changed/passed legislation to align the state accountability systems with ESSA goals, and (4) the U.S. Department of Education’s state plan approval was inconsistent with the ESSA statutory provisions. The findings provide timely insights into the ongoing process of ESSA implementation at the federal, state, and local levels.