My final post about my book, Constitutional Cliffhangers, will deal with fixing and preventing constitutional cliffhangers. One of my pet peeves is when an article identifies a potential constitutional problem and then concludes blithely that the best solution is just to amend the Constitution. Even passing a statute is tough. Heck, just getting Congress’s attention […]
Author Archive | Prof. Brian Kalt, guest-blogging
Constitutional Cliffhangers: When Law and Politics Mix
I promised to offer today some of the “general lessons” from my new book, Constitutional Cliffhangers. I will divide them into two posts that excerpt and paraphrase the final chapter of the book. This one will deal with the way that law and politics interact when constitutional cliffhangers play out. For the cliffhangers that would […]
Constitutional Cliffhangers: Responses to Some Comments
I have had a lot of fun this week blogging about my new book, Constitutional Cliffhangers. I’d like to thank Eugene again for inviting me, and to the readers and commenters, especially for their kind words. This week has been even better than my last appearance here, when Eugene unveiled Kalt’s Law of Presidential Facial […]
Constitutional Cliffhangers: Third-Term Presidents
The last chapter that I will preview from my new book, Constitutional Cliffhangers, is Chapter 6. It deals with a potential loophole in the Twenty-Second Amendment’s term limits for presidents. It’s also the only chapter that cites a commenter from the Volokh Conspiracy. The term-limit loophole has been noted and discussed a fair amount, dating […]
Constitutional Cliffhangers: Mutiny!
The next chapter of Constitutional Cliffhangers I’d like to present is Chapter 3, on the presidential disability provisions in the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. This is an unusual candidate for a cliffhanger for two reasons. First, one side of the constitutional debate seems to me to be clearly wrong, with no chance of prevailing in court. Second, […]
Constitutional Cliffhangers: Speaker v. Secretary of State
In my first post I said that my “cliffhangers” range from the merely interesting all the way up to full-blown constitutional crises. My favorite chapter in Constitutional Cliffhangers, Chapter 4, definitely qualifies as a crisis. Here is the opening: The United States is deeply divided over the war. Everyone agreed that we needed to fight […]
Constitutional Cliffhangers
By Prof. Brian Kalt, guest-blogging on January 24, 2012 8:18 am in Constitutional History, Constitutional Law, Constitutional Theory, Presidency
Hello Volokh Conspiracy readers! I’d like to thank Eugene for this opportunity to guest blog here about my new book, Constitutional Cliffhangers: A Legal Guide for Presidents and Their Enemies. Today I’ll have one post with a brief introduction, and another with an excerpt/discussion from one chapter. I’ll discuss a couple more chapters tomorrow and […]