Floor Debate Research Articles

The Art of the Review

What’s a book review for? You might think it’s to supply a summary of the book. Time is short. We’re drowning in stuff to read; it’s hard to keep up even if you dutifully apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and read very fast. Courts are constantly publishing new opinions. And—even though you’re used to this familiar feature of American law, you should still notice how startling it is—they’re also publishing unpublished opinions, with indefensible rules about whether or how they count as precedents lawyers can cite. Legislatures are publishing floor debates, not to mention committee hearings, and passing new statutes, the latter apparently written by Bulgarian bureaucrats struggling in their fifth semester of English as a second language. Don’t get me started on what the agencies are up to. (Quick! how many pages were added to the Federal Register while you read this paragraph?) Especially if you fear that some books should have been articles and that most law review articles are too long, you can be forgiven for basking in deep and abiding gratitude to the reviewer who boils things down. If you’re the tiniest bit unscrupulous, you can then pretend to have read the book yourself. You can even cite it, though I hope you have enough of a scholarly conscience left to feel uneasy about that morsel of cheating. (I hope too that “scholarly conscience” is not an oxymoron.) And you can be baffled or annoyed—I am—by the kinds of “reviews” that sometimes appear in, oh, The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, where the ostensible reviewer can barely be bothered to mention the book she’s allegedly reviewing, but just wants to tell you what she would have said had she written a book on the topic.

Anticipating the Consequences of Filibuster Reforms

Abstract Reformers have offered many proposals for changing the Senate filibuster, ranging from modest adjustments to outright abolition. I draw on formal models of obstruction in legislatures to analyze the consequences of three such proposals: creating an opportunity to close debate with a simple majority vote after a sufficiently long floor debate, making it more onerous for the minority to sustain filibusters, and outright abolishing the filibuster. In each of these cases, the models offer a more complete understanding of the effects of these proposals.

Populating ‘solidarity’ in political debate

Abstract The article examines the various ways in which ‘solidarity’ is invoked and signified through narrative and categorial devices in a political debate following the UK’s vote to leave the EU in 2016. Analysing a floor debate in the European Parliament concerning a white paper released by the European Commission on the future of the EU held in March 2017, we investigate how politicians deploy references to ‘solidarity’ in service of different political agendas. Our research highlights the strategic use of ‘core’ values in political debate through the way different speakers appeal to ‘solidarity’ as a self-evident positive value within the EU, but which is then mobilised through different relevant actors and scenarios to argue contrastive political positions. Our analysis demonstrates how narrative positioning and category-bound normative expectations are harnessed to serve the aims of political persuasion by “populating” a shared principle of governance with purposeful sets of identities and interrelations.

Testing Legislator Responsiveness to Citizens and Firms in Single-Party Regimes: A Field Experiment in the Vietnamese National Assembly

We investigate whether communicating constituents’ preferences to legislators increases the responsiveness of delegates to the Vietnamese National Assembly (VNA). Using a randomized control trial, we assign legislators to three groups: (1) those briefed on the opinions of their provincial citizenry, (2) those presented with the preferences of local firms, and (3) those receiving only information on the Communist Party’s objectives. Because voting data are not public, we collect data on a range of other potentially responsive behaviors during the 2018 session. These include answers to a VNA Library survey about debate readiness; whether delegates spoke in group caucuses, query sessions, and floor debates; and the content of those speeches. We find consistent evidence that citizen-treated delegates were more responsive, via debate preparation and the decision to speak, than control delegates; evidence from speech content is mixed.

Prenatal Nondiscrimination Laws: Disability, Social Conservatism, and the Political Economy of Genetic Screening

This article analyzes recent state laws and legislative debates in the United States concerning the prohibition of abortions performed because of a diagnosis of fetal disability. The article brings together critical theories to analyze the legislative records—including floor debates and committee hearings—in the four states that enacted disability PRENDAs before 2019. This analysis shows how social conservatives use disability PRENDAs to present themselves as the protector of the oppressed, while advancing their views about family and gender. Furthermore, I argue that PRENDAs place the burden for structural economic and political concerns on the shoulders of individuals, especially pregnant persons, while largely ignoring the medical-industrial complex as well as the government's own poor funding of social services for people with disabilities. Critical attention thus needs to be paid to how factors such as the ascendancy of genetics, the privatization of medicine, and the state's facilitation of capital accumulation for biotechnology corporations help constitute the ideal self-regulating risk-averse pregnant neoliberal subject. To bring attention to these factors, the article examines the political economy of non-invasive prenatal tests (NIPTs).

Who challenges disparities in capital punishment?: An analysis of state legislative floor debates on death penalty reform

In McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court tasked legislatures, rather than courts, with redressing racial disparities in capital punishment. Elected officials must then decide to amend disparate death penalty procedures. Analyzing floor debates, we explore why legislators make arguments for racial disparity or fairness in deliberations of death penalty reforms. Results suggest views on race and the death penalty are products of partisanship, constituency composition, and the race/ethnicity of legislators, with the interaction of these factors being most predictive of argumentation. Findings illuminate who leads discourse on fairness in criminal justice and the limits of legislative responses to racial injustice.

Leveraging Size: Congressional Simulations in a Large Lecture Course

The large introductory classes at many universities present a particular challenge for instructors wishing to guarantee participation opportunities for their students. Yet, large courses can actually afford advantages for instructors looking to replicate many features of the U.S. Congress. We describe two separate Congressional simulations in an Introduction to American Politics class of more than 300 students, including simulated committee hearings and markup, as well as a floor debate. We demonstrate how simulations can be scaled to classes of almost any size, regardless of whether they include teaching assistants.

Disgusting Affects from the Antinomian Controversy to the Antiabortion Movement

AbstractFocusing on disgust opens up critical paths that involve more expansive scopes of space and time than are possible with strictly historicist approaches to Puritan studies. This essay investigates the remarkably similar tactics for inducing disgust in narratives from the 1640s of the antinomians’ monstrous births and in the US Senate floor debate of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act just before the Iraq War in 2003. In both instances, rhetoric comparing familiar bodies to unfamiliar corporeal forms conjures powerful feelings of disgust that legitimize intervention. These powerful affective tactics help identify “rogues” to be eradicated—either colonial rogues, a “rogue procedure,” or a “rogue state”—hardening the border-focused feelings of disgust into hegemonic control. The essay concludes by taking a cue from the Puritans about embracing the inevitability of encountering disgusting feelings alongside wondrous ones, as well as inspiration from testimonies of abortion providers in the years immediately following Roe v. Wade, and arguing that critical attention to disgust enables the possibility of imagining a multiplicity of responses to different forms of embodiment.

Owning worldwide principles: The case of American exceptionalism

This article addresses the observation that, among 13 national legislatures compared, the proportion of floor debates containing a reference to the international community is lowest in the USA. Does the spirit of American exceptionalism make politicians particularly wary of being accused of cultural treason, so that they avoid references to exogenous models and international treaties or recommendations? Our analysis shows that, rather than alluding to the authority of the international community and to the principles it upholds, speakers refer to the self-image of the nation as a yardstick by which to assess whether a proposal aligns with esteemed values such as equality, freedom and democracy. In that way, rather than appealing to globally shared principles, the speakers claim ownership of them, constructing the USA as the self-evident origin of worldwide models. A comparison of the usage of the national self-image between the 13 countries studied here shows that it is most frequently used in the US Congress. Therefore, owning universal principles makes understandable the low frequency of international references in the US Congress.

Descriptive and Substantive Representation of Poor Citizens in Switzerland

Over the past decade, a large number of studies have shown that in advanced democracies policymakers are more likely to represent the preferences of high-income citizens than the preferences of low-income citizens. In a quest to understand this income bias in substantive representation, several authors have recently suggested that the persistent descriptive underrepresentation of low-income groups in policymaking institutions may explain why political decisions so frequently are skewed toward the preferences of the affluent. However, although this is a plausible explanation, many previous studies dealing with the consequences of descriptive representation have failed to find an effect of policymakers’ incomes or social class backgrounds on their behavior in office. In this essay, we argue that descriptive representation may indeed have an effect on policymaking, yet for it to be consequential three necessary conditions must be satisfied.

Book Review: Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

Book Review: Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. New York: Penguin Press, 2014. ISBN13: 978-1594204463 (Hard Cover). 288 Pages. $27.95.[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2014 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade's conjectures.2In A Troublesome Inheritance, Nicholas Wade articulates his vision of race and humanity in the 21st century. Wade believes that race determines life chances at the genetic level, and, therefore, Europeans are wealthy and powerful because they have superior genes. Sub-Saharan Africans, on the other hand, are poor and powerless because they have inferior genes.Does this sound familiar? It should because, far from articulating a new vision of race, Wade has simply applied fresh makeup to an ugly brand of scientific racism: eugenics. For those unfamiliar with the term, eugenics is a 19th century school of thought originated by Francis Galten, a cousin of Charles Darwin.The lure of Gabon's eugenics was his belief that society would be better off if the intellectually eminent could be encouraged to have more children. What scholar could disagree with that? (Wade, 2014, P-27)Well, since he's asking...I for one don't find Gabon's eugenicist bait the least bit alluring. Wade may, but that's where he and I differ.Eugenicists like Galton argue that some genes are better than others. Therefore, the key to improving the human condition is to cultivate good genes and cull bad genes. The criteria that eugenicists use to distinguish good from bad genes depends entirely on the pet prejudices of the eugenicist in question: Hitler hated Jews, but other eugenicists have had it in for Africans, Native Americans, indigenous Australians, etc. Eugenicists tend to be obsessed with eccentric notions of racial purity and many have advocated horrific social policies, ranging from sterilization to genocide, to prevent inferiors from sullying the gene pool:The primary reason for restriction of the alien stream...is the necessity for purifying and keeping pure the blood of America. (Wade quoting Congressman Robert Allen from a floor debate about US immigration policy, 2014, p. 31)In Chapter 2, titled Perversions of Science, Wade wags his finger at those eugenicists who, over the years, have gotten carried away with the whole racial purity thing. After all, Hitler was a bag egg, and no reputable eugenicist would want to be associated with him.Hang on a second, ''reputable eugenicist? Isn't that an oxymoron?Apparently not. At least not in the context of Wade's curiously convoluted argument. You see, sometimes scientific exegeses are dauntingly difficult to comprehend because the phenomena they elucidate, such as dark energy or quantum entanglement, are profoundly difficult to understand. In other cases, authors intentionally obfuscate scientific ideas because, were they to articulate their ideas in clear, straightforward language, they would invite censure from outraged readers. The calculated murkiness of Wade's argument falls into the latter category.No doubt, Wade would cry foul for my suggestion that his thesis is a half-baked rehash of 19th century eugenics. After all, Wade cites a fair number of scientists whose research is on the cutting-edge of evolutionary biology and genetics. Though Wade does cite those scientists, those also happen to be the scientists whose open letter repudiates Wade's thesis.Wade adopts a similar attitude toward recycling eugenics. Just because a few eager beavers, like Adolf Hitler, may have gone overboard, Wade contends that it would be unfair to tar all eugenicists with the same brush. Wade tips his hand early on by launching an oddly caustic defense of Samuel Morton, a 19th century craniometrist. …

Capabilities, Spillovers, and Intellectual Progress: Toward a Human Flourishing Theory for Intellectual Property

This essay takes a few steps toward a human flourishing theory of intellectual property. It begins with a brief explanation of the utilitarian economic theory of IP and my prior work on spillovers as an internal critique. Next, it discusses Amartya Sen’s development of the capabilities approach as an alternative to utilitarian economics (as well as rights based theoretical approaches). It provides the foundation for an external critique. It then highlights limitations in both the spillovers critique and the capabilities approach as an external critique, and suggests that some of the gaps left bare by the spillover critique may be filled by in the CA and vice versa. The essay also explains three ways in which law operates as a means for society to invest in capabilities: moral floors, social obligations, and leveraged resource allocation. Most of the CA literature that considers the role of law as means focuses on moral floors, such as minimum capability-based standards for nation-states rooted in human rights or manifest in Constitutions. The social obligations theory developed by Greg Alexander incorporates the normative values of the CA into property law and provides an excellent bridge to theory developed in this paper. Leveraged resource allocation, to my knowledge, has not received much, if any, attention elsewhere.Recognizing the intellectual property laws govern nonrival resources requires careful consideration of how society may use the law to leverage nonrivalry as a means for achieving various social objectives, including supporting various capabilities. The moral floors and social obligations theories help frame the conversation about which capabilities matter. But the ends (capabilities) best served (supported) by intellectual property laws are to a large extent limited by or dependent on the interdependent relationships between people, resources and actions within complex nested (economic, cultural, political, and social) systems. The social opportunities to leverage nonrivalry through law and other social institutions are constrained by these relationships, and we need to understand them better as we evaluate and possibly reform intellectual property laws. Integrating the spillovers and capabilities approaches reveals an incredibly useful mechanism by which society invests in public capabilities. The commons components of intellectual property leverage nonrivalry to sustain critically important public capabilities associated with intellectual, cultural, economic, political, and social development; legally-facilitated spillovers function as social investments in the capabilities of others.This essay does not resolve the underlying normative deficit problem in intellectual property. Many commentators, courts and casebooks will continue to assume (mistakenly) that intellectual property is fundamentally and unalterably utilitarian. As I have explained elsewhere, it is not. But even if we adopt human flourishing as our end and assume that developing capabilities within society is our normative objective, we still need to consider which capabilities to support and what mechanism to use for prioritizing or weighting different capabilities.Capabilities are tricky because maximization or optimization only make sense if you specify and prioritize or weight the various capabilities. In this essay, I do not engage that normative question and leave it open to political or other processes for making the normative commitments (and for further exploration in future scholarship). I may have my list and set of priorities, and you may have yours, but we might see areas of agreement emerge when we move off the moral floor debate and engage with the functional resource allocation concerns explored in this essay. Even if we do not find areas of agreement, we still might be able to leverage nonrivalry through the law in ways that leave it open for individuals or groups to decide for themselves what capabilities matter and when and how to exercise them.

How Should Top-Five Lists Be Developed?

Readers might wonder why the editors of JAMA Internal Medicine decided to publish “A Top-Five List for Emergency Medicine.” Some of our readers might practice emergency medicine (EM), and many provide “urgent” care. However, we decided to publish this article for another reason. We believe that “A Top-Five List for Emergency Medicine” from Schuur et al1 at Partners Healthcare demonstrates a solid methodological approach to developing a list of low-value tests, procedures, and treatments in response to the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation’s Choosing Wisely campaign.Althoughmanyprofessional societies havepublished “top-five” lists,most havenot detailed the methods by which the list was created. In some cases, it is clear that the lists were developed without much input fromfrontlinepractitioners, usingaprocess thatwasnot transparent andwithout clear criteria for inclusionon the list. We hope the article by Schuur et al1 will stimulate other professional societies to adopt clear, transparentmethods for developingand revising top-five listswith substantial input from practicing clinicians. We would like to see a consensus develop around criteria for choosing items on top-five lists. To start this conversation, we suggest that there should be clear evidence that the tests and treatments on a top-five list cause potential harm or provide little benefit to patients, are frequentlymisused in clinical practice, aremeasureable, and are under the control of providers. At least 50 specialty societies have now developed topfive lists for Choosing Wisely, and about 10 more are expected to publish lists in the next fewmonths. This activity is gratifying, butwebelieve it is also time to consider next steps. An important next step is to develop ways to evaluate the effect of the top-five lists onhealth caredelivery andhealth care value. To collect data, it will be important to focus on highimpact activities that can be tracked using electronic databases. Although partnering with specialty societies has been successful, we also believe that another crucial next step is to include other health care providers in the Choosing Wisely campaign so that nurses and pharmacists, among others, are on the same page. The involvement of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) in theChoosingWiselycampaignbeganwith discussion and a passionate floor debate at the 2012 national ACEP Council meeting. Those in favor of joining the Choosing Wisely campaign believed that identifying 5 good costsaving ideaswouldbe easy and that itwouldbe anembarrassment if EM ended up conspicuously absent from the movement.Thoseagainstnotedthat theACEPalreadyhadconvenedaCost-effectivenessCareTaskForce toaddress thesame issue. This group also believed that other barriers to joining ChoosingWisely are unique to EM, including that emergency department patients are sicker on average thanpatients cared forby someother specialists, thatmalpractice ismoreof a concern, that EMphysiciansmust follow the EmergencyMedical Treatment and Active Labor Act that requires they treat and stabilize anyone with an emergency medical condition, and that reimbursement is alreadyunderattackby third-partypayers who regularly down-code and discount emergency patient care. Furthermore,manyof theexistingChoosingWisely campaign recommendations fromother specialties seemed to be aimedat theEMscopeof practice. Theoutcomeof a closely divided council floor vote that followed was that the ACEP Council recommended against joining the Choosing Wisely campaign. At that time, Dr Schuur and colleagues at Partners Healthcare decided to independently develop a top-five list for EM. After further reflection, the board of directors of ACEP reversed their initial stance and decided to join the Choosing Wisely campaign. They asked Dr Schuur to help lead this effort. They built on his work described in this issue as well as the work of the Cost-effectiveness Care Task Force to create the ACEP’s top-five list. The Task Force had already developed a survey of all ACEP members for “cost-saving measures,” and more than 200 individual suggestions were received. The results of this surveywere grouped intodomains, and an expert panel used amodified Delphi technique to prioritize the recommendations following methods similar to those used by Dr Schuur and colleagues at Partners Healthcare.Multiple roundsofvoting followedto identifyhighly rated strategies that offered cost reductions and benefit to patients and were highly actionable by practicing EM physicians. The development process had a high level of specialty awareness (a floor debate at thenationalmeeting and specialty-wide survey data) and transparency. The final step included a literature review to establish a solid evidence base that specifically sought to include available cost data. Scientific support was assembled by a subcommittee of the Cost-effectiveness Care Task Force for each of the EM proposals for the Choosing Wisely campaign. The strategies that received majority support of the expert subgroup were then forwarded to the ACEP board of directors, who selected the top 5 for submission to the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation (http://www.choosingwisely Related article page 509 Opinion

Disabilityqueer: Federal Disability Rights Protection for Transgender People

The Americans with Disabilities Act does not protect everyone. It notably excludes people with Gender Identity Disorder (GID), an impairment involving the misalignment between one’s anatomy and gender identity. Many would say this is as it should be — gender nonconforming people are not impaired and so they should not be covered by disability law. But this argument misapprehends the reason that GID was excluded from the ADA in the first place. GID was excluded from the ADA because, in 1989, a small handful of senators believed that gender nonconformity — like pedophilia, pyromania, and kleptomania — was morally harmful to the community. In the eleventh hour of a marathon floor debate, and in the absence of an organized transgender lobby, the ADA’s sponsors and disability rights advocates reluctantly agreed to sacrifice GID and nine other mental impairments in exchange for passage in the Senate. The fact that Congress went out of its way to exclude GID, along with nine mental impairments that involve some harm to oneself or others, sends a strong symbolic message: people with GID have no civil rights worthy of respect. The ADA is a moral code, and people with GID are its moral castaways. In 2008, when Congress decided to expand the ADA’s definition of “disability” to protect more people, things should have been different for people with GID. Sadly, they were not. Instead of removing the GID exclusion once and for all, Congress enshrined its moral opposition to people with GID by preserving the exclusion intact. The ADA’s message to people with GID, and to the transgender community more broadly, is now clearer than ever: nearly twenty years after the passage of the ADA, people with GID are still despicable and even dangerous, and therefore undeserving of legal protection. The ADA’s moral code remains. In order to achieve true equality, transgender advocacy must rebut the moral case against transgender people. The ADA should play a prominent role in this project because the ADA’s GID exclusion “is” the moral case against transgender people. The ADA should be righted once more through passage of a modest bill, the “ADA Inclusion Act,” which removes GID from the ADA’s list of excluded impairments.

Deliberative Capacity in the Political and Civic Sphere

AbstractIn an evolving deliberative system, a crucial question is how deliberation of ordinary citizens differs from that of professional politicians. This study compares the deliberative capacity of citizens and political elites on exactly the same issue, namely a direct democratic initiative in Switzerland on the expulsion of criminal immigrants. In concrete, I perform a quantitative content analysis of the quality of citizen deliberation in an online poll and compare this to the quality of deliberation in representative politics, namely in the non‐public committee and public floor debates in the Swiss parliament. The findings show that political elites reach much higher levels of justification rationality than ordinary citizens, but achieve lower levels in terms of respect. I conclude that citizen deliberation, while useful as an advisory tool, cannot replace serious deliberative scrutiny in representative politics.

The emergence of race in national welfare politics: the 1962 and 1967 amendments to AFDC

This article traces the influence of post-war shifts in gender and race relations on the politics of federal welfare in the 1960s. It describes a conservative turn in the politics of welfare during this decade, driven in large part by the rising importance of race within the context of federal welfare policymaking. Contrasting President Kennedy’s Public Welfare amendments in 1962 with amendments to welfare added to President Johnson’s 1967 Social Security increases, the article identifies the declining influence of gender-based concerns and an increase in the importance of race in national welfare policymaking by the latter half of the decade. This shift occurred simultaneously with a move away from a rehabilitation framework designed to encourage work and self-sufficiency through expanded social services for welfare families, toward an employment-focused framework that required work from adult welfare recipients, enforced through punitive sanctions. In explaining the changes in national welfare politics during these years, I analyze the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) demographics and growth, public opinion survey data, and the partisan and ideological composition of congress. A content analysis of New York Times welfare coverage during each of these policymaking efforts, along with a close reading of congressional hearings and floor debates, provides empirical evidence for the shift from gender to race in national welfare politics. The article demonstrates that increasingly liberal gender norms and advances in civil rights for African Americans provided the impetus for reactive efforts by conservatives to re-impose post-war gender and racial norms where possible, with one manifestation being the restrictive and racially pejorative welfare politics that emerged in Congress by the late 1960s.

Nebraska Legislative History

This article discusses the use of legislative history in Nebraska to determine the legislative intent of a statute. When confronted with an ambiguous statute, Nebraska appellate courts have often construed it by reference to the statute’s legislative history. Nebraska courts have repeatedly relied on such documents as the introducer’s statement of intent, the committee statement, the committee hearings, floor debates, bill versions, amendments, statements from the governor, and other information found in the Legislative Journals.

BID TO REBUFF EPA RULE FAILS

SENATE DEMOCRATS have rejected a measure that sought to block an Environmental Protection Agency rule aimed at reducing air pollution from coal-fired power plant emissions that drift across state borders. The motion to void the EPA rule (S.J. Res. 27), offered by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), was defeated on Nov. 10 by a vote of 41-56 that fell largely along party lines. The resolution would have nullified EPA’s recently finalized Cross-State Air Pollution Rule. The rule requires 27 states in the eastern part of the U.S. to curb emissions of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, which contribute to smog and other air quality problems in neighboring states (C&EN, Oct. 17, page 42). “I think we can have a clean environment and jobs,” Paul said during the Senate floor debate. “But not if we let this Administration continue to pass job-killing regulations.” Paul, who represents a major coal-producing state, said the new antipollution rule could ...

Connecticut Legislative History

Connecticut's rules of statutory construction and treatment of legislative history were inconsistent until 2003, when the Connecticut Supreme Court, in State v. Courchesne, explicitly rejected the “plain meaning” rule. The legislature subsequently overruled Courchesne and codified the rule in Connecticut General Statute § 1–2z. In determining legislative intent, the courts will generally recognize floor debate, testimony at committee hearings, the title of an act, the statement of purpose, and the purpose the law was intended to serve.

Presidential War Power in the Deliberative Moment - An Empirical Study of Congressional Constitutional Deliberation and Balance of War Power

This paper examines how congressional deliberation over the constitutionality of a use of force affects the war power relationship between the president and Congress. In particular, it presents empirical data on whether and how Congress exerts its attempts to control presidential war power through deliberation, on the limits of congressional ability to regulate a war, on historical patterns of the presidential unilateral use of force, and on the institutional conditions for good congressional deliberation. My main argument is that congressional deliberation over the constitutionality of a use of force is a primary influence on Congress’s ability to exert its will through the passage of legislation to check the president’s use of force. I focus on congressional floor debates recorded in the Congressional Record (1989-2009) over different use of force events occurring from 1989 to 2003. These incidents are collected from the Correlates of War Project Dataset. I cluster 229 congressional deliberations on the constitutionality of the use of force and bills thereof into 14 military events according to the war timeline depicted by the Correlates of War Project Dataset. In response to the main research question, I present three empirical models. The first empirical model demonstrates that a higher level of congressional deliberation over a use of force influences Congress to impose a higher level of control over presidential war power. The second model demonstrates that as long as Congress imposes control over a military deployment, the president systematically resists that control. Although the second model demonstrates that congressional attempts to check presidential war power cannot prevent the president from taking unilateral military action, I argue that this result suggests that it is even more important for Congress to have better deliberation and to try to impose a check on the president, which can create an unequivocal legal and political accountability for the president. Therefore, I present the third empirical model to demonstrate that congressional rule-setting, including referral of a bill to committee, an adoption of open-rule floor debate, and deliberation over a non-annual budget bill, is the primary factor determining the quality of congressional deliberation.