Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
Forty years ago the Watergate scandal deeply wounded Americans' faith in government. Since then, good-government reformers and big-government opponents have been on a shared mission to make everything transparent. The problem is that too much light is scaring Congressmen away from making the tough choices necessary to govern in the national interest. It's no secret that the backrooms are where things get done and where politicians can collaborate...
Author
Language
English
Description
THE BOOK WASHINGTON DOES NOT WANT YOU TO READ
How is it that politicians often enter office with relatively modest assets, but then, as investors, regularly beat the stock market and sometimes beat the most rapacious hedge funds? How did some members of Congress know to dump their stock holdings just in time to escape the effects of the 2008 financial meltdown? And how is it that billionaires and hedge fund managers often make well-timed investment...
Author
Language
English
Description
The U.S. Senate is a book in the Fundamentals of American Government civics series, exploring the inner workings of this important part of the legislative branch. As with Selecting a President, this book is written for all audiences, but voiced toward high school seniors and college freshmen-or any citizen interested in a concise yet authoritative exploration of this representative entity. Written by former Senator Tom Daschle, and co-written by acclaimed...
Author
Language
English
Description
"What sort of combination of hypocrite and paradox is John Kerry?" asks this heated critique of the Democratic presidential candidate's Vietnam-era military service and antiwar activism. O'Neill, a lawyer and swift boat veteran, and Corsi, an expert on Vietnam antiwar movements, show how Kerry misrepresented his wartime exploits and is therefore incompetent to serve as commander in chief. Buttressed by interviews with Navy veterans who patrolled Vietnam's...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Winner of the Fenno Prize" Eric Schickler is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
From the 1910 overthrow of "Czar" Joseph Cannon to the reforms enacted when Republicans took over the House in 1995, institutional change within the U.S. Congress has been both a product and a shaper of congressional politics. For several decades, scholars have explained this process in terms of a particular collective...
Author
Language
English
Description
Keith J. Bybee holds the Michael O. Sawyer Chair of Constitutional Law and Politics at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
Is it ever legitimate to redraw electoral districts on the basis of race? In its long struggle with this question, the U.S. Supreme Court has treated race-conscious redistricting either as a requirement of political fairness or as an exercise in corrosive racial quotas. Cutting through these...
Author
Language
English
Description
Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid takes a candid look at Washington personalities and politics, revealing the motives and strategies, the cooperation and rivalry, the honesty and the deceit behind a seemingly minor piece of legislation. He traces the course of S.790--the Inland Waterways Bill--from its inception to its eventual passage, a process with as many twists and subplots as a novel, and with characters just as vivid.
In Congressional Odyssey:...
Author
Language
English
Description
While the hyper-partisanship in Washington that has stunned the world has been building for decades, Ira Shapiro argues that the U.S. Senate has suffered most acutely from the loss of its political center.
In Broken, Ira Shapiro, a former senior Senate staffer and author of the critically-acclaimed book The Last Great Senate, offers an expert's account of some of the most prominent battles of the past decade and lays out what must be done to restore...
Author
Language
English
Description
They come to Washington for varied and complex reasons-driven perhaps by some deep emotional commitment to an issue, or believing that their time in Congress can make their dream of the presidency a reality. No matter what their motivation or particular route, freshmen have three traits in common: they will be members of one of the most powerful deliberative bodies on the planet; they will have far less leverage and influence than they might have...
Author
Language
English
Description
The veteran political journalist and New York Times bestselling author goes behind the scenes at the White House to recount the dramatic tale of a pivotal period in the Obama presidency, from the game-changing 2010 midterm elections to the beginning of the critical 2012 campaign season-a tumultuous time that tested the president as never before and set the stage for a titanic clash over the future of the nation
After Barack Obama's first two years...
Author
Language
English
Description
According to a Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans want elected officials to serve only a limited number of terms. Nevertheless, every two years American voters return, on average, more than 95 percent of incumbents to the U.S. House of Representatives. John Hibbing's book provides unique evidence of the problems that would result from congressional term limitations. The first scholar to analyze congressional careers using longitudinal data, Hibbing...
Author
Language
English
Description
Required reading for anyone who wants to understand how to work within Congress.
The House and Senate have unique rules and procedures to determine how legislation moves from a policy idea to law. Evolved over the last 200 years, the rules of both chambers are designed to act as the engine for that process. Each legislative body has its own leadership positions to oversee this legislative process.
To the novice, whether a newly elected representative,...
Author
Language
English
Description
Special rules enable the Senate to act despite the filibuster. Sometimes.
Most people believe that, in today's partisan environment, the filibuster prevents the Senate from acting on all but the least controversial matters. But this is not exactly correct. In fact, the Senate since the 1970s has created a series of special rules-described by Molly Reynolds as "majoritarian exceptions"-that limit debate on a wide range of measures on the Senate floor.
The...
Author
Language
English
Description
How is it that the United States-a country founded on a distrust of standing armies and strong centralized power-came to have the most powerful military in history? Long after World War II and the end of the Cold War, in times of rising national debt and reduced need for high levels of military readiness, why does Congress still continue to support massive defense budgets?
In “The American Warfare State”, Rebecca U. Thorpe argues that there are...
Author
Language
English
Description
E. Scott Adler is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His current research examines the factors that effect legislative activity and specialization by members of Congress over the course of their careers. He has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and Urban Affairs Review, and is the author of Why Congressional Reforms Fail: Reelection and the...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Winner of the 2009 Louis Brownlow Book Award, National Academy of Public Administration" Eric M. Patashnik is associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia. His books include Putting Trust in the US Budget: Federal Trust Funds and the Politics of Commitment.
Reforms at Risk is the first book to closely examine what happens to sweeping and seemingly successful policy reforms after they are passed. Most books focus on the politics...
Author
Language
English
Description
Analyzes long-term interest group/party alliances, with a focus on the part played by federal advisory committees.
This book sheds light on the dealings between special interests and political parties by challenging three long-standing assumptions: that transactions between interest groups and parties are quid pro quo exchanges, such as the buying and selling of legislation; that the interrelationship between bureaucrats and interest groups is accommodating...
Author
Language
English
Description
Making Congress Work, Again, Within the Constitutional System.
Congress for many years has ranked low in public esteem-joining journalists, bankers, and union leaders at the bottom of polls. And in recent years there's been good reason for the public disregard, with the rise of hyper-partisanship and the increasing inability of Congress to carry out its required duties, such as passing spending bills on time and conducting responsible oversight of...
In Interlibrary Loan
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by Jackson County Oregon can be requested from other Interlibrary Loan libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup.
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service. Submit Request