Republican Majority Research Articles

The Risk of Expanding the Uninsured Population by Repealing the Affordable Care Act

Discussions surrounding repeal or repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have been a high priority for the Trump administration and the Republican majority of the US Congress, but specific replacement plans are less clear. Levitt1 outlined what the ACA replacement plan might look like based on proposed legislation from House Speaker Paul Ryan (R, Wisconsin) and Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price. Levitt observed that repeal of the entire ACA and the replacement plans that have been proposed recently by Republican congressional leaders “would likely result in more people uninsured, less comprehensive benefits, and fewer protections for people with preexisting conditions.”1

The state of American health care: November 2016 to November 2020, a look forward.

The election of Donald Trump, coupled with the retention of Republican majorities in the US House of Representatives and Senate, raises questions about future of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the structure and funding of the country's public health insurance programs - Medicare, Medicaid and the Child Health Insurance Program - and the direction of health policy in the United States, more generally. Political scientists are not renowned for their capacity to predict the future and many of those who forecast election results have received criticism in recent weeks for failing to predict the Trump victory. While the future is uncertain, it is possible for social scientists to offer a 'conditional causal analysis' about the future. This essay is an effort to think about the likely shape of American health care between now and the next US presidential election.

Die radikalen Steuerpläne der US-Republikaner und die Folgen für die EU

The Republican majority in the US House of Representatives is considering the introduction of a destination-based cash flow tax (DBCFT). While its global implementation has the potential to substantially increase welfare, a unilateral introduction of such a tax system raises a range of questions due to the existence of source-based taxation systems abroad. We consider the US tax plans from an EU perspective. We show that European exporters may suffer, but European firms with affiliation in the US may benefit from a switch to the DBCFT. American firms will be the likely losers of this policy. Finally, we discuss potential policy reactions by the EU and its member countries as well as legal and economic implications of possible adjustments in EU tax systems.

A Delicate Balance: Party Branding During the 2013 Government Shutdown

Strong party brands help congressional parties elect candidates, maintain or gain majority control, and advance their policy agendas. Because successful branding efforts depend on consistent messaging, party leaders try to choose issues that most members are willing to promote. But what do leaders do when a party majority pressures them to take up issues that harm the brand for others? We investigate the 2013 government shutdown as a branding event. House Republican leaders instigated the shutdown after learning that a majority of Republicans would not vote for a clean funding bill. However, instead of highlighting the issues that led to the shutdown, they publicized the party’s efforts to resolve it. Party leaders sought to exploit the fact that party brands have both position and valence components to simultaneously address the demands of the party base and the electoral concerns of members representing competitive districts.

THE SCOURGE OF ILLITERACY IN AUTHORITARIAN TIMES

The dark times that haunt current age are exemplified in monsters that have come to rule United States and who now dominate major political parties and other commanding political and economic institutions in United States. Their nightmarish reign of misery, violence, and disposability is also evident in their dominance of a formative culture and its at- tendant cultural apparatuses that produce a vast machinery of manufactured consent. This is a social formation that extends from mainstream broadcast media and Internet to a print culture, all of which embrace spectacle of violence, legitimate opinions over facts, and revel in a celebrity and consumer culture of ignorance and theatrics. Under reign of this normalized ideological architecture of alleged commonsense, literacy is now regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data, and science is confused with pseudo-science.Thinking is now regarded as an act of stupidity, and ignorance a virtue. All traces of critical thought appear only at margins of culture as ignorance becomes primary organizing principle of American society. For instance, two thirds of American public believe that creationism should be taught in schools and a majority of Republicans in Congress do not believe that climate change is caused by human activity, making U.S. laughing stock of world.1 Politicians endlessly lie knowing that public is addicted to exhortation, emotional outbursts, and sensationalism, all of which mimics celebrity culture. Image selling now entails lying on principle making it all easier for politics to dissolve into entertainment, pathology, and a unique brand of criminality. The corruption of both truth and politics is made all easer since American public have become habituated to overstimulation and live in an ever-accelerating overflow of information and images. Experience no longer has time to crystallize into mature and informed thought. Opinion now trumps reasoned and evidence based arguments. News has become entertainment and echoes reality rather than interrogating it. Popular culture revels in spectacles of shock and violence.2 Universities have become McDonalized and knowledge is now subject to practice of a fast education resulting curricula that resemble a fast-food menu.3 Unsurprisingly, education in larger culture has become a disimagination machine, a tool for legitimating ignorance, and it is central to formation of an authoritarian politics that has gutted any vestige of democracy from ideology, policies, and institutions that now control American society.I am not talking simply about kind of anti-intellectualism that theorists such a Richard Hofstadter, Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky, and more recently Susan Jacoby, have documented, however insightful their analyses might be. I am pointing to a more lethal form of illiteracy that is often ignored. Illiteracy is now a scourge and a political tool designed primarily to make war on language, meaning, thinking, and capacity for critical thought. Chris Hedges is right in stating that the emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and corporations that saturate landscape with manipulated images and idiom of mass culture.4 Words such as love, trust, freedom, responsibility, and choice have been deformed by a market logic that narrows their meaning to either a relationship to a commodity or a reductive notion of self-interest. We don't love each other, we love our new car. We don't love each other, we love our new car. Instead of loving with courage, compassion, and desiring a more just society, we love a society in saturated in commodities. Freedom now means removing one's self from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence. George Monbiot points to way in which freedom has been transformed under neoliberalism. He writes:The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for pike, not for minnows. …

The Conversion of Senator Arthur Vandenberg: From Isolation to International Engagement by Lawrence S. Kaplan

Reviewed by: The Conversion of Senator Arthur Vandenberg: From Isolation to International Engagement by Lawrence S. Kaplan Gregory L. Schneider Lawrence S. Kaplan, The Conversion of Senator Arthur Vandenberg: From Isolation to International Engagement. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. 294pp. $45.00. Any student of the origins of the Cold War has probably heard about or read a story about a meeting between Michigan Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg, consummately described as an old Right isolationist, with President Harry Truman. The date was January 1947 and the subject was Soviet pressure on Greece and Turkey. The new Republican majority, skeptical of the containment idea and of an expanded foreign presence in Europe, had to be scared about the threat of communism and the necessity of aiding Greece and Turkey with military and economic aid to resist Soviet pressure. Vandenberg was said to be so scared and wound up eschewing his isolationism and embracing the Truman Doctrine. Nothing in history is ever so neat. Vandenberg, a former Teddy Roosevelt progressive in his youth, had not been so scared. Rather, as this superb biography of the Senator and his transition to internationalism reveals, the transition from isolationism to internationalism was more gradual and evolutionary. It was not Soviet pressure on Greece and Turkey which played the major role in this transition; rather, it was Pearl Harbor six years before which played the crucial role in turning a skeptic about internationalism into an internationalist. Lawrence Kaplan is well positioned to tell this story as the master historian of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and as a student of American–European relations. Vandenberg was a Grand Rapids newspaperman, who spent one year at the University of Michigan before becoming editor of the Grand Rapids Herald. The editorial line was progressive Republican and so were Vandenberg’s politics. In 1928 he was appointed to an open Senate seat to fill a vacancy and during his time in Congress pursued a working relationship with both Herbert Hoover and with Democrat Franklin Roosevelt. While no New Dealer, he was also not a laissez-faire conservative and not a practitioner of the conservative anti-New Deal politics embodied on the political Right in those years. Vandenberg’s true interest remained foreign affairs and he was a committed isolationist. He had been a member of the Nye Committee hearings and had fought against the power of the munitions makers and war profiteers, giving many speeches in Michigan about the desire to keep out of foreign wars. Amazingly, given the drift toward New Deal liberalism in Michigan [End Page 139] and the sight of sit-down strikes in early 1937, Vandenberg easily won reelection as a Republican, showing his fungible manner in representing himself as an isolationist on foreign affairs and as a progressive on domestic matters. World War II changed Vandenberg’s views and moderated his prewar isolationism. He gained significant national attention for a speech reiterating a desire for a strong internationalism given on the floor of the Senate on January 10, 1945, a few weeks before FDR departed for the Yalta conference. The speech showed his growing internationalism and pursuit of clarification of the necessity for a new approach in American foreign policy. (Kaplan considered it such an important turning point that it is republished in the index to the book.) The speech drew notice from the administration and Vandenberg was named a delegate to the San Francisco conference to establish the United Nations. He worked diligently and sought the advice of both John Foster Dulles, the senior delegate to the conference and columnist Walter Lippmann. He took the work seriously and supported the San Francisco Treaty and the establishment of the UN. At the same time he developed a realistic assessment of the Soviet Union and was not prepared to accept the administration’s approach that Josef Stalin could be worked with to shape the peace. In this question regarding the onset of the Cold War it would have been nice to see more engagement with recent assessments of Truman by scholars like Wilson Miscamble’s From Roosevelt to Truman, which shows that the president was not the hard liner on the Soviets until late...

Sunbelt Identities: The Pursuit of Place, Process, and Political Sensibilities

Sunbelt IdentitiesThe Pursuit of Place, Process, and Political Sensibilities Sean P. Cunningham (bio) Although historians cannot verify with absolute certainty when the word “Sunbelt” was first uttered, there is no question that the concept of a region that stretches from California to Florida was popularized in Kevin Phillips’s highly influential 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority. In that book, Phillips, a political strategist with ties to Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, forecast a partisan realignment in which the GOP would grow dominant at the national level by coalescing the votes of racially motivated southern whites with the votes of middle-class suburbanites, especially those living in or near the growing metropolises of the West and Southwest, where economic fortunes seemed at the time both unlimited and inextricably tied to oil, agribusiness, technology, and defense. This idea was quickly coined as the “Southern Strategy,” with a variety of iterations—including “Sunbelt Strategy,” “Suburban Strategy,” and “Southwestern Strategy”—emerging in more recent decades. When conservatives did in fact succeed at the national level during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, many recalled The Emerging Republican Majority with a sense that Phillips’s strategic vision had been realized.1 For those looking back at Phillips’s work within the context of Ronald Reagan’s America, the concept of an emerging Sunbelt was largely a political development. And because scholars are usually quicker to identify political developments (as opposed to social, cultural, or economic ones), distinguishing Sunbelt studies from the rise of modern American conservatism has been, and continues to be, a somewhat laborious task. A different way of putting this would be to say that the Sunbelt has never established a clear “sense of place” apart from a political context. Another way of putting this is to say that scholars are still wrestling with the general concept of regional [End Page 63] identity and have yet to settle on the precise contours of what does and does not define the Sunbelt. Of course, regionalism in almost any form is a subjective construct. A person might refer to herself as a “southerner,” a “westerner,” or perhaps a “midwesterner,” but people cannot retain an official or legal claim to these regions in the same way that someone can be a citizen of a nation or a resident of a state. A person might speak with a “midwestern” accent, enjoy “southern” cooking, or dress in “western” attire, but the degree to which these ideas can be neatly traced to a place with defined geographic boundaries is limited. More simply, regional identities are often fluid and mostly imagined. Today, very few individuals living in Kevin Phillips’s world of the “emerging Republican majority” go out of their way to identify themselves as part of the Sunbelt. And yet the idea of an identifiable Sunbelt continues to gain traction among historians, political scientists, and other scholars who seek to understand social, cultural, economic, and political transformations within the United States. Most scholars who talk about the Sunbelt define it as a region stretching from California—primarily Southern California—across Arizona, Texas, and eventually to Florida, while also extending as far north in some places as southern Colorado, or up to parts of Virginia along the east coast. Taking a cue from Kirkpatrick Sale, it is simpler to say that the Sunbelt is the southern half (or “Southern Rim”) of the continental United States, but there are obviously significant differences between the Sunbelt and the American South, at least in terms of popular imagination.2 When most Americans think about the “South,” they might first imagine a rebel flag, and then connect that symbol with the collection of states that seceded from the Union to form the Confederacy and fight the Civil War. But the concept of a modern Sunbelt defies such clear borders or symbols. In fact, the Sunbelt is usually defined more clearly in terms of cities rather than states, and even more clearly by cities sharing a common set of economic characteristics. Whereas the South’s character remains imprisoned in some ways by its Confederate past, the Sunbelt is at least partially defined by expansive growth and affluent modernity. Historians discussing the Sunbelt...

Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy by Edward H. Miller

Reviewed by: Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy by Edward H. Miller David Cullen Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy. By Edward H. Miller. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. vi, 230. $25.00, ISBN 978-0-226-20538-0.) Between 1968 and 2008 the GOP's southern strategy resulted in the political reorientation of the solid South. Once a comfortable home for the Democratic Party, the former Confederacy was a house full of Republicans by the first decade of the twenty-first century. The story of the southern strategy often begins with the Richard M. Nixon administration embracing the arguments made by Kevin Phillips in The Emerging Republican Majority (New York, 1969). Edward H. Miller challenges this assertion by arguing that the work of a handful of skillful Dallasites foreshadowed the southern strategy by at least a decade. Miller's well-written and well-organized book profiles ultraconservative residents of Dallas who challenged the consensus that Texas would remain loyal to the Democratic Party for the foreseeable future. Some of the figures profiled are well known, such as H. L. Hunt, Bruce R. Alger, John G. Tower, Edwin A. Walker, and W. A. Criswell. Other persons may be recognized by scholars but not the general public. Examples are Dallas Morning News publisher Edward Musgrove "Ted" Dealey, oil and gas tycoon Peter O'Donnell, and the CEO of Texas Instruments, J. Erik Johnson. These men provided the money to sustain the Republican Party, forums to publicize their concerns, colorful personalities to draw attention to their cause, and a conviction that the solid South would dissolve and provide an opportunity for the GOP. [End Page 746] One particular strength of the book is that Miller identifies an important but overlooked group that proved invaluable to the party's success: women. Bruce Alger's successful runs for Congress in the 1950s resulted from the support and work of Highland Park women. Miller includes Rita Bass, who led "80 Women from Dallas," a group opposed to disarmament, in his assessment of the importance of Texas women to shaping the Republican Party. Sue Fitch chaired the Public Affairs Luncheon Club, using the organization to bring in conservative speakers who argued that capitalism and the American way of life were threatened by communism and the civil rights movement. Margot Perot used her influence to network and lobby in behalf of the party. Miller points out that seven of the nine directors of the Texas Republican Club's Women's Division were Dallasites. Miller also focuses on three institutions that shaped the debate between ultraconservative and moderate Republicans. Under the leadership of Dealey, the Dallas Morning News became a venue to argue against organized labor, the Supreme Court, and, in particular, the John F. Kennedy administration. The day of Kennedy's assassination, the paper ran an ad accusing the president of communist sympathies. As he and his wife were leaving Fort Worth to travel to Dallas, the president responded, "We're heading into nut country today" (p. 7). The money for the ad came from members of the John Birch Society. Dallas was home to over seven hundred John Birch Society members, making the city's chapter one of the largest in the country. Finally, Miller examines the influence of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, the largest Southern Baptist congregation in the United States. Under Criswell's leadership, the church became a strong voice that opposed the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision and conflated communism and the civil rights movement. Miller convincingly argues that these persons and institutions made Dallas the catalyst for the political realignment of the region, successfully contending that white southerners who felt betrayed by their party and, in the early 1960s, by their native son Lyndon B. Johnson should switch their loyalty from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. David Cullen Arkansas Tech University Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

Medicaid Expansion in a Litmus State: The Missouri Struggle.

For a century Missouri was a bellwether state in presidential elections, always picking the winner. Since 2008 it has been experiencing a partisan divide along urban/rural lines with President Obama losing the state twice. The battle over Medicaid expansion found a Democratic governor unable to convince a Republican legislative majority to support ACA-based expansion. The more highly partisan legislative environment has rendered traditional bargaining and negotiations impossible on the controversial question of Medicaid expansion.Despite supportive advocacy by hospitals and the business community, the Republican legislative leaders have opposed any movement on Medicaid expansion over the past four years. There will be a new occupant in the governor's mansion in 2017, which may create a fork in the road. Democrats are unlikely to regain a legislative majority, and one path is continued Republican refusal to consider expansion. The other path features the new governor responding to the national 2016 election outcome, and creating the prospects for a deal, perhaps around a waiver plan.

Political Party Affiliation of the President, Majority in Congress, and Sin Stock Returns

We find that in contrast to the stock market, which performs better during Democratic presidencies, “sin” stocks—publicly traded producers of tobacco, alcohol, and gaming—perform better during Republican presidencies and even more so when the Republican presidency is accompanied by a Republican majority in at least one chamber of Congress. We examine whether sin firms use contributions to establish connections with politicians and find that sin firms contribute more to Republican candidates and that these contributions are greater when Republicans are in power. We also find a positive relation between political contributions and future returns. The relation is stronger for contributions to Republicans.

A Bipartisan Tax Reform?

If one listens to what Democratic and Republican candidates for president are saying on the campaign trail, the chances for tax reform in 2017 and beyond appear to be minimal. To pass tax reform, a bipartisan approach is essential, because even if we have a Republican president and Republican majorities in both houses, they are unlikely to be able to get major tax reform through the Senate without 60 votes. But the parties seem very far apart on tax reform. Democrats are focused on using the tax system to reduce inequality, and are determined to raise the tax rates at the top of the income distribution. Republicans would like to cut those rates for both individuals and businesses.But if one pays close attention, it would seem that the potential for a bipartisan deal is there, regardless of who occupies the White House in 2017. The key is that Democrats are primarily focused on individual taxes, and even some Republicans agree that some taxes should be raised for the wealthy (e.g., by closing the “carried interest” loophole, a position supported by both Jeb Bush and Donald Trump.) Republicans, on the other hand, have detailed plans to reform business taxes, some of which can have support from Democrats (e.g., limiting the deductibility of interest to corporations, which both Bush and Trump support).This situation appears to make a bipartisan tax reform possible: Republicans would agree to raise some rates on the rich (especially on capital gains and dividends, which are concentrated at the top 1% of the income distribution). Democrats would agree to business tax reform, because in a globalized world our businesses suffer from having the highest corporate tax rate in the OECD.

When Voters Pull the Trigger: Can Direct Democracy Restrain Legislative Excesses?

Direct democracy is sometimes described as a “gun behind the door,” but how do legislators react when voters pull the trigger? Leveraging the high‐profile referendum defeat of a controversial law passed by the Ohio legislature, I examine how legislators respond to voter disaffection. Using interest groups to “bridge” votes before and after the election, I show that the measure's defeat induced moderation on the part of the Republican legislative majority, while leaving the behavior of opposition Democrats largely unchanged. The results suggest that direct democracy has the potential to restrain legislative excesses and alleviate polarization in state legislatures.

Black Votes Count: The 2014 Republican Senate Nomination in Mississippi*

ObjectiveThis article examines the role of black votes in contributing to the renomination of 36‐year Republican Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi. In 2014, Senator Cochran faced a formidable primary challenge from State Senator Chris McDaniel, a notably more conservative politician. After narrowly losing the primary, Cochran prevailed in the runoff because enough black voters decided to support him.MethodsWe use precinct‐level racial data to derive ecological inference estimates of turnout and then employ a racially homogenous precinct analysis to determine the percentage of the black and white vote won by Cochran and McDaniel.ResultsOur empirical analysis provides convincing evidence that if not for the increase in black voters in the runoff and their overwhelming support for Senator Cochran, his opponent would have ended his lengthy political career.ConclusionsRace has always been the centerpiece of politics in the Deep South state of Mississippi. This is an empirical account of an unlikely electoral event that speaks to the importance of the changing state of southern politics and how a marginalized minority population can still play a pivotal role in a region dominated by a white Republican majority.

Why the Sky Didn't Fall: Mobilizing Anger in Reaction to Voter ID Laws

Since 2002, 26 U.S. states have passed laws that enhance restrictions on voters who intend to register and vote. Most have been sponsored by Republican legislators and passed by states with large Republican majorities. Proponents of such identification requirements argue that they are necessary to ensure the integrity of the electoral system by reducing voter fraud. Many Democrats have cried foul, arguing these laws are motivated by crass partisanship at best, and racial bias at worst, because they disproportionately disenfranchise minorities. Surprisingly, empirical evidence for significant demobilization, either in the aggregate or among Democrats specifically, has thus far failed to materialize. We suspect strong emotional reactions to the public debate about these laws may mobilize Democrats, counterbalancing the disenfranchising effect. We find support for this conjecture in a nationally representative survey and an experiment where news frames about voter identification (ID) laws are carefully manipulated.

The role of party politics in medical malpractice tort reforms

The U.S. tort system has experienced various reforms over the last three decades. While there is an extensive literature on the consequences of these reforms, very little is known about their determinants. In this study, we investigate the role of party politics in the reform process across U.S. states. In order to test whether any party effect goes beyond voter preferences, we apply the idea behind regression discontinuity studies based on close electoral outcomes to semi-parametric proportional hazards models. We find that in states with close election outcomes, a narrow Republican majority in the lower house is associated with a 50 to 150% higher risk of tort reform enactment compared to a narrow Democratic majority. Our results indicate that party politics plays a role in tort reforms over and above potential underlying preferences in the constituency.

Family planning policy in the United States: the converging politics of abortion and contraception

ObjectivesFollowing decades of mainstream bipartisan support, contraception has reemerged as a controversial political issue in the United States. At the same time, opposition to abortion has intensified. State legislatures across the country have enacted highly visible policies limiting access to family planning. Perhaps the most striking example occurred in 2011 in Texas, when legislators instituted unprecedented requirements on abortion providers and cut public funding for contraception by two thirds. Yet, despite popular interpretations of this phenomenon as a simple byproduct of increasing partisan divisions, little is understood about the factors underlying such policy shifts. Study designWe fit Bayesian ideal-point models to analyze correlation patterns in record-vote data in the Texas House of Representatives in the 2003 and 2011 Legislatures. Both sessions had large Republican majorities and saw the passage of restrictive abortion bills, but they differed markedly with respect to public funding for contraception. ResultsWe demonstrate that variation in voting on family-planning issues cannot be fully attributed to partisanship in either session. However, the politics of abortion and contraception have converged over time, and — at least for Democrats — the correlation between constituency characteristics and voting behavior on family-planning legislation is markedly higher in 2011 than in 2003. These shifts have been partly driven by legislators from high-poverty, majority Latino districts near the US–Mexico border. ConclusionsRecent dramatic shifts in family-planning policy go beyond simple partisan divisions. As the politics of abortion and contraception have converged, policies that are increasingly hostile to reproductive health and that disproportionately affect low-income minority women have emerged. ImplicationsRecent shifts in family-planning policy restrict women's access to contraception and abortion, yet little research has examined why such shifts are occurring. This paper analyzes factors underlying voting behavior on restrictive policies in Texas. Identification of these factors helps us to better understand the current political climate surrounding our field.

Identifying the Critical Members of the House of Representatives

This article combines the historical record of presidential-congressional relations with previous scholarly findings to develop a model that identifies the members of Congress whose support is critical to the president's ability to build enacting coalitions. It then analyzes the relationship between President Obama and the House of Representatives during the 113th Congress as a case study that demonstrates the model's utility. Conventional wisdom and political pundits suggest that presidents working in divided government will have impossible difficulty working with Congress, but history suggests otherwise. The president's ability to successfully build enacting coalitions during divided government requires him to perform two rather disparate tasks. First, the president must minimize the amount of presidential party members who cross party lines to vote against the president's position. Second, the president must entice at least some opposition party members to cross party lines and support the president's position. Using data from 1981 to 2015, I find that representatives’ behavior on presidential support votes are related to constituency-level presidential strength, electoral vulnerability, ideological moderation, and ideological extremity. I use these results to identify the critical members of the 113th Congress. When a majority of these critical members supported President Obama's positions his legislative efforts were successful. When a majority of these members opposed the president's positions, the House Republican majority defeated the president.

Introduction

Introduction Melvin I. Urofsky Last winter the Society lost one ofits best friends with the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Scalia hosted a large number of the Society’s programs in the Courtroom, and I personally recall how much fun he had presiding over the re-enactments of some of the great cases to have come before the Court. Moreover, he made it a point that all of us involved should have a good time as well. This issue carries two tributes to Justice Scalia. One is from his long-time jurisprudential opponent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Despite their differences, the two were close friends from the time they both sat on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Part oftheir bond was a shared love ofopera, and they both considered it a great old time when invited to sing in the chorus of one production of the Washington Opera. They also appeared to take a great deal ofpleasure out of an opera written about the two ofthem. Over the years Justice Scalia, who served on the Court from 1986 to 2016, had many clerks, and when I run into one occasionally, they are unanimous in affirming his kindness to them, his graciousness, and at the same time a demand for very high-quality work. Kannon Shanmugam, who is now a partner at Williams & Connolly, clerked for the Justice in the October 1999 Term, and writes about his experience. This issue contains the article versions of the talks given in last year’s Leon Silverman Lectures, on the general subject of Recon­ struction after the Civil War. Justice Anthony Kennedy, in introducing Michael Ross, noted that Reconstruction is a mystery to most. It is an era that is “very important to understand in order to get a sense of who we are, and what our law is, and how we got to ... this point in history.” Michael Ross is professor ofhistory at the University ofMaryland, and a member ofthe Board ofEditors for this Journal. In his article he tries to do what Justice Kennedy says is so important, namely understanding Reconstruction for the impact it had on the country, on the Court, and also on the meaning of the Civil War. While historians ofthe Constitution have always recognized the importance of the Slaughter-House Cases, in the last few years there has been increased attention paid not 248 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY only to its impact—especially the dissent of Mr. Justice Field—but also to the case and the politics surrounding it. Randy E. Barnett, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theoiy at the Georgetown University Law Center, looks at how the case can be interpreted as a matter of public health, a case of public corruption, and most recently, as a narrative of race. One of the great legacies of Reconstruc­ tion, and one that is still vitally important to current jurisprudence, is the Fourteenth Amendment. While today we are primarily concerned with its Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses, in the 1860s the Amend­ ment embodied the Republican plan for Reconstruction. Faced with a sure veto from Andrew Johnson if it tried to enact the plan statutorily, the Republican majority in Congress felt unsure whether Johnson might be right, that it had no constitutional authority to pass such legislation. So they drafted the amendment, and made it a requirement that, before any of the Confederate states could be admitted back into the Union, they had to ratify it. Laura Edwards, the Peabody Family Professor of History in Trinity College at Duke University, shows how the amendment had an immediate effect. It not only opened the court system to the freed slaves, but affected northern judicial systems as well. When did Reconstruction end? The view accepted by most historians is 1877, when the “Compromise” gave contested Southern Electoral College votes to Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the end of military occupation ofthe former rebellious states. By this view, the Republican Party essentially abandoned the freedmen to the Southern states, and within a few years the institutions of Jim Crow appeared throughout the former Confederacy. In the last fifteen years, however, a number of...

“Politics Is Mighty Uncertain”: Charles Hays Goes to Congress

“Politics Is Mighty Uncertain”: Charles Hays Goes to Congress William Warren Rogers Correction: This digital version of volume 69, issue no. 1 of the Alabama Review differs from the print edition. Pages 34, 50, 63, 65, and 67 in this digital version reflect corrections made to the previously-distributed print edition. Charles Hays led white and black Republicans in Greene County and most of the Black Belt during Reconstruction in Alabama. Born in the county in 1834, Hays was the son of a wealthy planter who had migrated from South Carolina in the late 1820s. Educated at the University of Georgia and the University of Virginia, Hays became a planter in his own right. Nominally a Democrat, Hays was not active in politics, and while not an outright Union man, he was not a secessionist. During the Civil War he married Cornelia Ormand, daughter of a judge of the Alabama Supreme Court. Hays served as a major in the Confederate army. Later he returned to planting and in 1867 confounded his friends by declaring himself a Republican. That fall he was elected and served as a delegate to the state constitutional convention. In February 1868 Hays was elected to the state senate.1 Hays directed Republican strategy from his large plantation, Hays Mount, near the Greene County village of Boligee, eight miles west of the county seat at Eutaw. At the constitutional convention and in the state senate Hays attempted to obtain the removal of all political disabilities from former Confederates. In the fall of 1868 Republican Hays helped carry the state for the national Republican ticket. Adding to his reputation [End Page 26] by playing a conservative but forceful role in the state senate, Hays was plainly marked for higher office as a Republican, although the stigma as a scalawag made him an anathema to most Black Belt whites. The winter elections of 1868, confirmed by the congressional act of June 12, 1868, had determined local and state offices and decided seats in the national House of Representatives. The congressmen elected sat for only a partial term, the remainder of the Fortieth Congress, which ended March 4, 1869. Republican Governor William H. Smith called a special congressional election for Tuesday, August 3, 1869.2 Fully identified with the Republican party and already vilified and ostracized, Hays had nothing to lose by entering the congressional race. If nominated and elected he would represent the newly created Fourth District, formed along with five other districts by the legislature in February 1867.3 The Fourth District was a large sprawling area containing a major portion of the Black Belt and a few white counties. Heavy black majorities resided in Greene, Hale, Marengo, Perry, and Sumter counties. Pickens in the northwest, Choctaw in the Southwest, and Autauga in the northeast were slightly more than fifty percent black. Six counties—Baker, Bibb, Fayette, Sanford, Shelby, and Tuscaloosa—had more whites than blacks, but even in these counties blacks constituted sizeable minorities. For that matter, Tuscaloosa strongly resembled and identified with the Black Belt counties. The county’s intransigence was largely due to the presence of Ryland Randolph, native-born descendant of Virginia aristocrats, outspoken critic of congressional Reconstruction, and editor of a leading Democratic newspaper, the Independent Monitor. Tuscaloosa County became the scene [End Page 27] of much Ku Klux Klan activity with Randolph the local leader. The incumbent congressman for the district was the little-known carpetbagger, Charles Wilson Pierce, a native New Yorker and Union veteran who came to Alabama to command the Freedmen’s Bureau subdistrict of Demopolis. In the spring of 1869 he accepted the post of Assessor of Internal Revenue of the First District and so did not seek renomination to congress.4 The Fourth District represented a potentially solid Republican bastion. Yet the Conservative Democrats were both resentful and resourceful, and maintaining a Republican majority was more difficult than establishing one. Looking ahead to the August elections, one Republican editor believed they would “be attended by scarcely less important results than any political contest since Lee’s surrender.”5 Selecting the right man to replace Pierce would be important. One possibility was the native-born William...

The Voting Rights Act at 50 and the Section on Election Law at Birth: A Perspective

This is a reply to the three papers that were presented at the inaugural meeting of the new Section on Election Law, which took place at the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, on January 4, 2015. The author tries to assess where we stand regarding the future of the Voting Rights Act and also provides a short history of the creation of the Section on Election Law itself.