Majority Leader Research Articles

The Last Great Senator: Robert C. Byrd’s Encounters with Eleven U.S. Presidents by David A. Corbin (review)

Reviewed by: The Last Great Senator: Robert C. Byrd’s Encounters with Eleven U.S. Presidents by David A. Corbin Ronald L. Lewis The Last Great Senator: Robert C. Byrd’s Encounters with Eleven U.S. Presidents. By David A. Corbin. (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2012, Pp. ix–xiv, 364.) For a politician as prominent as the late West Virginia senator Robert C. Byrd, few know much about the man himself or his political accomplishments, mostly because the senator was a modest and private man. As an employee of the US Senate for twenty-six years, the last fifteen as an aide to Senator Byrd, [End Page 91] David Corbin is in a unique position to assess Byrd’s US Senate career, and the author’s revelations of the senator’s behind-the-scenes negotiations and the philosophical principles behind his votes are major contributions by an accomplished historian. Robert Byrd’s ascent from poverty to power is an oft-told story. The loss of his parents at an early age, his rearing by poor but proud relatives who treated him as their own son, his election to the West Virginia House of Delegates and then to the state senate, and his successful congressional elections first to the US House and then to the US Senate is embraced as an affirmation of the American myth of the self-made man. That Byrd would be elected to the Senate for nine full terms and serve fifty-two years in that august body, making him the longest serving senator in history; that he would cast more roll-call votes than any other senator in history; and that he would hold the most Senate leadership positions in history could not have been foreseen even by the senator himself, and certainly not by his detractors among the Washington elite. For years they failed to take him seriously and denounced him variously as racist hillbilly, country bumpkin, hillbilly Uriah Heep, rustic boob, and the king of pork. Academically an undereducated (he never earned a bachelor’s degree, but he did earn a law degree after ten years of night school while serving in the Senate), poor son of a West Virginia coal miner, they simply dismissed him as unqualified for high office. However, his rapid rise to powerful positions such as Senate whip, majority leader, and chair of the appropriations committee, along with his major legislative successes, forced them to eat crow. It should be emphasized that Byrd’s power base was not within the political establishment of West Virginia, but rather among the ordinary citizens across the length and breadth of his home state. Throughout his life he maintained the same values acquired while growing up in southern West Virginia and firmly rooted in his fundamentalist-protestant religion, what Corbin calls his hillbilly morality. He was convinced that God had “ordained this nation, and that this nation has responsibilities to perform under God” (43). His ultrapatriotism was neither chauvinistic nor militaristic but rather grounded in the belief that it was America’s God-appointed mission to bring liberty and peace to the world. The belief that “God had guided the hand of the Founding Fathers in the formation of American law—that is, the Constitution—the same as he presented Moses with the law for mankind” was the cornerstone of Byrd’s political philosophy (44). Therefore, the Constitution was holy writ and a law must be treated with reverence; any changes must preserve the checks and balances at the heart of the Constitution which were explained in the Federalist Papers. Byrd’s strict construction of the Constitution could cut both ways and was most obvious in the positions he took on civil rights. When he voted against [End Page 92] the 1960 civil rights bill to end the poll tax, the southern bloc applauded, and integrationists were outraged. He had been a member of the KKK very briefly in his youth, and both progressives and conservatives jumped to the wrong conclusions regarding his political motivations. To Byrd, the bill was unconstitutional because the Constitution gave states the power to establish election laws. He favored abolishing the poll tax, but it had to be done...

How Vladimir Putin’s Divorce Story Was Constructed and Received, or When the President Divorced His Wife and Married the Country Instead

When the Russian president divorced his wife in 2013, social media crowds coined plenty of the Internet memes to interpret the news. Anastasia Denisova, Doctoral Researcher at CAMRI, examined the framing of the story in traditional and new media and came to the surprising findings.

The Costs and Benefits of Mandatory Securities Regulation: Evidence from Market Reactions to the JOBS Act of 2012

The effect of mandatory securities regulation on firm value has been a longstanding concern across law, economics and finance. In 2012, Congress enacted the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (“JOBS”) Act, relaxing disclosure and compliance obligations for a new category of firms known as “emerging growth companies” (EGCs) that satisfied certain criteria (such as having less than $1 billion of annual revenue). The JOBS Act’s definition of an EGC involved a limited degree of retroactivity, extending its application to firms that conducted initial public offerings (IPOs) between December 8, 2011 and April 5, 2012 (the day the bill became law). The December 8 cutoff date was publicly known prior to the JOBS bill’s key legislative events, notably those of March 15, 2012, when Senate consideration began and the Senate Majority Leader expressed strong support for the bill. We analyze market reactions for EGCs that conducted IPOs after the cutoff date, relative to a control group of otherwise similar firms that conducted IPOs in the months preceding the cutoff date. We find positive and statistically significant abnormal returns for EGCs around March 15, relative to the control firms. This suggests that the value to investors of the disclosure and compliance obligations relaxed under the JOBS Act is outweighed by the associated compliance costs. The baseline results imply a positive abnormal return of between 3% and 4%, and the implied increase in firm value is at least $20 million for an EGC with the median market value in our sample.

NAACP Youth and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1936–1965 by Thomas L. Bynum (review)

Reviewed by: NAACP Youth and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1936–1965 by Thomas L. Bynum Lee Sartain (bio) NAACP Youth and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1936–1965. By Thomas L. Bynum. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013. Pp. 226. $49.00 cloth) Any mention of African American youth in the civil rights struggle will evoke images of the sit-ins of 1960 and the Freedom Rides of 1961. Rarely (if ever) is the NAACP involved in this popular history [End Page 532] of youth activism because, as an organization, it is often considered staid and legalistic. In this respect, Bynum’s monograph on NAACP youth groups is an important historiographic development that places youth activism into the long civil rights history and shows that 1960s radicalism was but part of a tradition of youth activism dating back to the 1930s. Bynum has inserted NAACP youth members into the civil rights narrative in a comprehensive manner, although his book builds on the work of Rebecca De Schweinitz (If We Could Change the World [2009]) while having none of her legal or philosophical depth. Indeed, Bynum’s book has a broad approach and often misses nuance that local or state studies can give. Indeed, the very concept of youth required further examination as De Schweinitz does in her research. For example, the debate that the NAACP undertook on who exactly is youthful is mentioned in a footnote (p.155, n21). The concept of teenager had to be invented in a materialistic age and the debate of the delineation between childhood, young person, and the transition to adult was ongoing. Did the concept of youth in society change from the 1930s to the 1960s and was that reflected in NAACP organizing? There is little practical or structural deliberation given to the fact that organizational youth leadership was regularly decapitated through the aging process. NAACP college chapters had perennial problems of summer holidays and students who undertook paid work and studied rather than being activists. Sometimes the youth abandoned NAACP groups due to its conservatism and control by the adult branch, but often they just got older and moved on. However, the idea that young people contain special talents and are free from the constraints reserved for adults certainly required further acknowledgement. There is little development of gender or leadership theory and, therefore, the book feels somewhat old fashioned at times. The author highlights major female leaders of the NAACP youth wing, such as Juanita Jackson and Ruby Hurley, but does not explain why they were able to exert their leadership. Was it unique to the NAACP that women could become major organizational leaders? Was it youth [End Page 533] activism that allowed young and single women to pursue leadership? Interesting and important characters are often introduced, yet very little is made of their contribution beyond reporting with scant detail. For example, Muriel Gregg, a promising leader who joined the NAACP field staff in 1955, followed a familiar pattern for women by resigning to get married. Bynum states that Herbert Wright, NAACP youth secretary, “commented that the association needed someone as efficient as Gregg but with a better personality” (p. 69). This is quite a statement and really needs analysis. Was Gregg rejected by the NAACP due to being a strong female leader in a patriarchal organization? Similarly Herbert Wright, whose career went from student activist to NAACP leader, is underdeveloped in these pages as a major personality who developed the youth councils during the 1950s and seemed to have an intuitive understanding of how to build up a youth movement. Overall, this is a standard text that reports on an important aspect of neglected history. Its strength is in its focus on generational conflict between youth and adult members of the NAACP. However, there was so much more to be considered. Lee Sartain LEE SARTAIN is a senior lecturer in American history at the University of Portsmouth, England. He is the author of Invisible Activists (2007), Borders of Equality (2013) and co-editor of Long is the Way and Hard: 100 Years of the NAACP (2009). He is currently working on black youth movements of the 1940s and 1950s and also...

Procedural Signaling, Party Loyalty, and Traceability in the U.S. House of Representatives

In this article, we take advantage of a new source of data providing updates from the Majority Leader’s Office that signal the leadership’s positions on floor votes. We offer a more nuanced explanation of voting in the U.S. House as our findings suggest that not all procedural votes are created equal. While the most liberal members of the party vote with the leadership on procedural votes at high rates and nearly 100 percent of the time when signaled by the majority leader, moderate members are significantly less likely to support the party and are not responsive to these signals.

Exploring the role of the Senate Majority Leader's political public relations efforts

Grounded in first- and second-level agenda building, this study explored the role of the U.S. Senate Majority Leader in shaping the salience of issues and issue attributes in news media coverage and policymaking in 2011. A total of 358 public relations messages, 164 newspaper articles, and 83 policymaking documents were analyzed. Significant correlations were found supporting agenda-building linkages at both levels. Different types of information subsidies were explored, including press releases, blog posts, Facebook posts, and Twitter messages.

The Changing Roles of House Party Leadership Organizations: The House Republican Policy Committee

More than 100 members in each of the two House party caucuses participate in the parties’ formal organizations—the extended party leadership. What purposes do these institutional components of the parties serve, and how and why have they changed over the last three decades? This article begins to answer these questions through a case study of the Republican Policy Committee based on primary documents as well as quantitative analysis. I show that the Republican leadership has used the committee for participation, coordination, and communication functions within the Conference, but that the roles of the committee have changed substantially in response to strengthening party government conditions, GOP majority status, heightened competition for control of the House, and the individual goals of key Republican leaders. Among other changes, the committee became more important for coordinating policy positions and strategy during the 1980s, but the strong, centralized majority leadership in the 1990s diminished this important coordination function and left the committee with an emphasis on partisan communication.

The Major Challenges and Countermeasures to Carry out EHR

With the development of information technology, as one of the important tools of enhancing human resources management, EHR has widely been used by many enterprises. The author systematically talks about major issues and challenges encountered in implemention of EHR in enerpreises. And the author advances some countermeasures as follows: to strive for understanding and full support of the major superior leaders; to improve relevant system and information structure of enterprises; to establish scientific procedural documents; not solely depending on service providers; to ensure security of the system.

Margaret Thatcher, the Thatcherite intellectuals and the fate of Keynes

AbstractIn the early 1970s, major political leaders of the centre‐right such as Richard M. Nixon proudly declared their allegiance to the Keynesian consensus and the welfare state. By the mid‐1970s, this consensus unravelled so rapidly that even the leader of Britain's Labour Party came to regard Keynesian medicine as ineffectual. Seeking to demolish several foundations of the Keynesian welfare state, Thatcherism soon attracted economists and policy pundits eager to defend its achievements, including in North America at such bygone hotbeds of Keynesianism as Harvard University. This essay seeks to probe cherished mythologies of Thatcherism that she restored Britain's economic dynamism, streamlined government and revived plucky entrepreneurship. Her intellectual admirers have largely averted their eyes from law‐and‐order repression and the rewards delivered to politically connected insiders, most dramatically those policies unleashing finance capitalists and extending the tentacles of the Murdoch media empire.

Challenges and Novel Solutions for SoC Verification

Hundred million gates SoC designs are all over the place with the trend of doubling the scale in up-coming years. Meanwhile time-to-market makes the situation even more difficult. More and more effort has been allocated onto SoC verification in order to tackle the challenges, including the improvement of software-based verification performance, formal verification, hardware acceleration as well as unified verification. But innovation is still needed, as the existing solution won’t be able to handle efficiently of the increasing design size. This paper will first try to address all major issues which would challenge the SoC verification execution as well as quality. At the second part of this paper, we will discuss how Cadence addresses these challenges including, but not limited to, early software development, metric driven verification, formal verification application, Hardware/Software integrated validation and low power. Through close partnership with major industry leaders, Cadence’s solution has been proven to provide a substantial turn-around time reduction while maintaining high quality of result for various SoC projects.

Connected Health And The Rise Of The Patient-Consumer

Connected Health And The Rise Of The Patient-Consumer

Why are some Flemish municipal party group leaders more familiar with NPM principles than others? Assessing the influence of individual factors.

This study addresses the controversy in the literature regarding the effects of individual factors on party group leaders’ familiarity with a selection of New Public Management concepts. In doing so, it contributes to the scarce literature regarding this group of non-executive politicians. Furthermore, this study has an innovative methodological approach, introducing an NPM “familiarity coefficient” in order to make a quantitative assessment. Data was gathered from a survey of 363 party group leaders in Flemish municipalities and the results reveal moderate familiarity. Factors that had a positive effect on the NPM familiarity coefficient were being a majority leader, dual mandate holding and financial as well as political expertise.

Congressional Obstruction and the 'Black Agenda': Why Obama's Critics are Letting Congress Off the Hook and Shortchanging the Development of Effective Political Activism

The election of Barack Obama to the White House gave many African Americans hope that a new era of equal rights and economic opportunities would come to fruition under his administration. Despite Obama’s reelection and personal popularity among the African-American electorate, many African American scholars and political activists have persistently voiced their disappointment and eroding support for the President by arguing that he has not put forward a political agenda specific to the needs of the black community. However, to date it appears that these critics have not published an explanation of how Congressional obstruction in the House and Senate, as well as Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s failure to negotiate filibuster reform prevents the President from successfully navigating any legislation in Congress as well as and judicial and executive nominations that, if passed, would support the infrastructure needed to promote social reform for all underrepresented and vulnerable Americans. In this paper, I will explain that while there are numerous legitimate issues of concern for the black community, the insistence of a presidential or Congressional black agenda is a political non-starter. I will also argue that the failure to explain the complexities related to Congressional obstruction is promoting a disservice and undermining the capacity of community activists and political allies from engaging in collaborative political action with constituencies with similar concerns to put forth an agenda that can accomplish much needed social change. The insistence of a black agenda also undermines the opportunity to strengthen African American electoral turnout in party primaries, mid-term elections, and state and local elections. It also weakens the focus on other pipelines that allow politicians to come to Congress with the intent of rolling back social and political development for all people of color. The African American community can achieve many of their goals by supporting a political agenda that benefits their community by engaging in effective collective action for vulnerable low and middle-income voters who need banking and housing reform, immigration reform, stronger employment rights, as well as increased protection for the rights of women.

Commentaries on health services research

Commentaries on health services research

Leadership Nature of Commanders in Royal Thai Air Force

The Royal Thai Airforce is applying leadership theories and principles in modernizing the organization. This paper explores the nature of leadership in The Royal Thai Airforce to gain some fundamental information which may be useful in a long term planning. Relevant theories of leadership are reviewed. Three major types of leadership styles are considered: transformation, transaction, and laissez-faire. 30 commanders with ranks equal or higher than squadron leader with experience in RTAF at least 10 years were selected for a questionnaire survey. The majority leadership characters found is transformation leadership characters (X = 3.99 out of 5) follows by laissez-faire (3.67) and transaction (3.44). All the transformational leadership characters possess high score: Idealized Behavior (3.94), Inspirational Motivation (3.93), Intellectual Stimulation (3.89), and Individual Consideration (4.21) show high scores while active management by exception gains only moderate score (3.35) and so are passive management by exception ( 2.99). Laissez-faire leadership shows also a high score (3.67). At this stage of investigation the reasons for the existing distribution of leadership characters in RTAF and how the planned distribution should be are unknowns and need further investigation.

Leader neurons drive spontaneous and evoked activation patterns in cortical networks

Recent studies about the generation and propagation of coordinated activity in cultured neuronal networks reported the existence of privileged neurons that consistently fire earlier than others at the onset of synchronized bursting events (or network bursts, NB), which have been termed major burst leaders (MBL) [1]. At the same time, by stimulating the network from different channels one can obtain very different responses, not only in size and delay but also in the activation order of the responding neurons [2]. We electrically stimulated rat cortical networks cultured on micro-electrode arrays from different locations, either MBL or non-MBL. We evaluated the intensity and the delay of responses from either MBL or non-MBL and we also compared the spontaneous and the evoked activation patterns. By comparing the responses obtained by stimulating either MBL or non-MBL, we found that the stimulation from MBL induces on average earlier responses. By comparing the responses of MBL and non-MBL, we found that MBL respond better and more rapidly to the stimulation coming from any other site in the network. Some networks showed different spontaneous propagation patterns within synchronized bursts depending on the identity of the corresponding MBL (Figure ​(Figure1).1). In these cases the evoked propagation patterns correlate with the spontaneous ones and also depend on the spatial location of the stimulating site with respect to MBL. Figure 1 A. Similarity matrix of activation order for 1000 spontaneous NB, ranked according to the MBL (indicated by numbers). Two distinct propagation patterns are visible. B. Color maps of average delays of followers with respect to either MBL spontaneous activation ... To summarize, we demonstrated that MBLs do not only drive the propagation of coordinated spontaneous activations, but also play a special role in coordinating and driving the evoked bursts of activity.

Perceptions and activities of religious leaders on the prevention of HIV/AIDS and care of people living with the HIV infection in Ibadan, Nigeria

IntroductionThe epidemic of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) continues in Nigeria despite efforts to control it. Meaningful efforts aimed at combating this disease must be multisectoral. However, despite the major influence religious leaders have in this society, their role has not been well studied. The aim of the study was to assess the perceptions and activities of religious leaders on prevention of HIV/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and care of people living with the virus in Ibadan, Nigeria.Materials and methodsIn a cross-sectional study, 336 leaders from eight religious denominations in Ibadan were surveyed utilizing a self-administered, semi-structured questionnaire. Respondents were selected by cluster sampling technique. Data was analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences software version 15.ResultsThe mean age of respondents was 37.9 (± 13.5) years. The majority (97.6%) were aware of the HIV/AIDS scourge, and most had good knowledge of routes of transmission and modes of prevention (85.7%). Attitudes to people living with HIV/AIDS were positive in 84.2% respondents, and many practiced preventive measures (94.9%). One hundred and ninety (56.5%) respondents had ever preached about HIV/AIDS transmission and treatment to their congregations, while 257 (76.5%) used their position as a medium of educating their congregation about the dangers of HIV/AIDS and how to prevent it. Further analysis showed that respondents who were Christians (P = 0.026), had ever been married (P = 0.004), and were males (P = 0.002) were more likely to have ever preached about health issues to their congregations (individual role).ConclusionThe study concluded that the religious leaders are well informed about HIV/AIDS and have adequate knowledge and positive attitudes towards people living with AIDS. However, they need encouragement and training to enable them to more effectively harness their position for HIV prevention and to control programs and activities among their congregation to thereby play a crucial role in the war against HIV/AIDS in Nigeria.

My Last Column

My Last Column

Maurice Friedman

This is a professional and personal tribute to the late Maurice Friedman. His explication of Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue and his profound understanding of the dialogical in human interaction is discussed. Friedman’s understanding of how to apply this dialogical philosophy to psychotherapy is explored. There is a review of some of his innumerable contributions to existential and humanistic psychology, as well as his many interactions with some of its major leaders. The reflections of the author’s personal and professional relationship with Maurice Friedman are presented as a specific example of how he embodied what he wrote about.

Just How Many Newt Gingrich's Are There on K Street? Estimating the True Size and Shape of Washington's Revolving Door

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s choice not to register the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) for his “historical advice” to Freddie Mac was a controversy in the 2012 Republican primary. The practice of carefully crafting policy advocacy activities to avoid triggering disclosure requirements is commonly referred to as the exception after the former Senate Majority Leader became a leading “strategic adviser” to one of Washington’s biggest lobbying firms. In this paper we ask: how many professionals are engaged in policy advocacy, and how common is it for them to have worked in the federal government? We assume that high-profile cases of Daschle and Gingrich are not isolated, so we seek to account for lobbying and policy advocacy in as large an empirical scope as possible. Using a new data set of professional biographies of both registered lobbyists and unregistered policy advocates, we estimate that there are more professionals engaged in influencing public policy under the radar than there are who are transparent about their clients and activities, implying that lobbying disclosure reports provide only a partial view of policy influence in Washington. We also find that, unlike Gingrich and Daschle, unregistered policy advocates are less likely to have gone through the revolving door and are more likely to be general political process experts rather than institutional specialists.