Joseph Lane
Joseph Lane is the Hawthorne Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory & Henry. He previously taught at Hampden-Sydney and at Bowdoin College. He is interested in stories, particularly the way that political thinkers and actors use stories to construct our ideas about politics, justice, and the proper distribution of power in society, and he enjoys deconstructing the rhetoric of American politics by reading it through a diverse range of texts including Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, Euripides’ Trojan Women, Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker, and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. He is the co-author of
The Deconstitutionalization of America: The Forgotten Frailties of Democratic Rule (2004) and author of the forthcoming Green Paradoxes. When he isn’t pontificating to his students, he enjoys hiking, biking, and climbing in and around southwest Virginia and spending time with his wife, Julie, and baby daughter, Grace.
What Romney Doesn’t Say About Health Care (And Why It Matters)?
Many stories have played up the Obama administration's recent praises for former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney's role in passing health care reform in that state during his time in office there. Members of the administration and Democrats closely tied to the President, have lauded up Romney's role in crafting the Massachusetts law and the close connections between that law and the new federal health care reform. Some have gone so far as to suggest that Romney is "co-author" of what the right calls Obamacare. Read the rest of this entry »
Reagan’s Dick Cheney Doctrine
Scholars of American political development debate whether the (still?) current age of Republican ascendancy began with Nixon or Reagan, but regardless of the proper placement of the historical marker, the primary philosophical arguments for what we now think of as modern conservatism emerged with Reagan. Nixon played upon many of the themes (as well as many of the suspicions and resentments) that have helped sustain this ascendancy, but he did not articulate the powerful theoretical framework that would justify a conservative approach to our politics. We may live in Nixonland, but ours is the Age of Reagan.
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President Obama: Let Me Introduce You to the U.S. Senate
In the 2007-2008 academic year, I taught a seminar course on the presidential selection process that was subtitled, “Why Senators Don’t Win the Presidency.” I started the course by pointing out that since John F. Kennedy’s victory in 1960 more than 40 sitting U.S. Senators had launched credible campaigns for the presidency without even one succeeding. Admittedly the success rate for presidential candidates is necessarily low, but surely such a 48-year run of futility marked some handicap that Senators suffered in the presidential contest. To understand this consistent track record of failure, we then studied the modern nomination process
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Birthright Citizenship and Republican Hypocrisy
The debate over birthright citizenship ruckus on Capitol Hill this week is revealing on severa levels. For one, this event should make it clear that all the Republican talk about "strict construction of the Constitution" and fidelity to "original intent" of Constitutional provisions is both selective and hypocritical. Furthermore, I find it interesting that few commentators recognize the real parallels between the reasons for adopting the Fourteenth Amendment then and the cases that are arising now.
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When Founders’ Envy becomes Political Obstruction
Asked to write about the most troubling feature of our national politics, I have considered many inviting targets---the filibuster and the Senate, the Supreme Court and the (ab-)use of judicial review, the constantly expanding modern presidency all come to mind---but in starting to write about any of these possible topics, I was struck again and again by the following inescapable fact:
that we can’t make an argument about any of these things without having to thrash through well-worn and largely irresolvable debates about what the “Founders Fathers” did, or did not, think about the practice in question.
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Dangerous Party Politics, Yesterday and Today: 1860 Redux
During the 1850s, the National Democracy Party was increasingly racked by internal purity purges in which those who were insufficiently loyal to evolving (and constantly more restrictive) party orthodoxies were unceremoniously run out of the party they long served.
Today's "tea party" phenomenon suggests that factions within parties are seizing a greater control over the internal nominating politics and platform statements of the larger parties of which they are a part.
And the painting of the opposition party as a dangerous and unAmerican "other" who cannot be trusted with power or worked with when in power has become more pronounced.
These parallels between the party dynamics of 1860 and 2010 ought to make us think twice about the tenor and trajectory of our increasingly balkanized politics, "purity" tests, bitter primary contests, and our inflammatory political rhetoric.
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Presidential ‘Question Time,’ Reconsidered
Who knew that when I raised issues about the possibility of a more interactive engagement between the executive and the legislative - "Question Time" on the UK model, discussed in this blog both during the campaign and last September - that I was ahead of the consensus.
Now, in the aftermath of President Obama's illuminating discussion with the House Republican caucus and in the run-up to his bipartisan discussion to restart health reform, everyone on both the right and the left is clamoring for a regular forum for "The President's Question Time."
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“You Lie!” Why the U.S. Needs a Presidential “Question Time” Like the Brits
One wonders whether British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is snickering a little at all the hoopla over this single shouted accusation during the President Obama's speech the other night.
Of course, Brown hears far worse than one little “Liar!” every Wednesday in the House of Commons at Question Time.
John McCain has suggested that we should have something like Question Time here in the U.S., and he's right.
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Advice and Consent: The U.S. Senate and the Supreme Court
The quarrel about when and how to have hearings, and in the case of Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, whether or not to attend them, points to a more interesting feature of this whole arrangement:
the fact that there is no constitutional guidance about what exactly the Senate is supposed to do with a Supreme Court appointment.
There is no guidance as to how the Senate is to offer "advice" or how it is to express "consent."
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The Politics of Judicial Appointments – Shifting Grounds
It is tempting to opine - as many commentators unfortunately do - that only recently did Supreme Court appointments become the occasion for major political conflicts.
Not true.
And should Republicans really be relishing this battle over the Supreme Court seat? What are the risks?
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