Wisconsin Politics and Government
Wisconsin Politics and Government

Author: James K. Conant

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 9780803215481

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Throughout the twentieth century, Wisconsin won national visibility and praise for its role as a ?laboratory of democracy? within the American federal system. In Wisconsin Politics and Government James K. Conant traces the development of the state and its Progressive heritage from the early territorial experience to contemporary times. Conant includes a discussion of the four major periods of institutional and policy innovation that occurred in Wisconsin during the twentieth century as well as an examination of the state?s constitution, legislature, office of the governor, courts, political parties and elections, interest groups, social welfare policy, local governments, state-local relations, and current and emerging issues. ΓΈ Readers of Wisconsin Politics and Government are likely to find a close correspondence between Wisconsin's social, economic, and political experience during the twentieth century and the essential democratic characteristics Alexis de Tocqueville describes in his classic work Democracy in America. For example, Wisconsin?s twentieth-century civil society was highly developed: its elected and administrative officials continuously sought to improve the state's political and administrative institutions, and they worked to enhance the economic and social conditions of the state's citizens. Other modern characteristics of the state's democratic experience include issue-oriented politics, government institutions operating free of scandal, and citizens turning out to vote in large numbers.

The First and Second United States Empires
The First and Second United States Empires

Author: Jack E. Eblen

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre

Published: 2010-11-23

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 0822975726

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In the late eighteenth century the fledgling republic of the United States was faced with the problem of devising a form of government to oversee its vast land possessions north and west of the Ohio River. To fill this need, Thomas Jefferson drafted the Ordinance of 1784, which evolved into the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Deliberately modeled on the British colonial system, it granted territorial governors broad autocratic powers. It defined government in the Northwest, and all other subsequent territories in the public domain. Eblen defines two historical periods (empires): 1787-1848; and 1849-1912; based on government land acquisition. This book describes the nature of government in all the contiguous territories of the United States, offering an original and comprehensive view of the role and meaning of territorial government, and the administration of the Western territories.

Strangers to the Constitution
Strangers to the Constitution

Author: Gerald L. Neuman

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2010-07-01

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1400821959

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Gerald Neuman discusses in historical and contemporary terms the repeated efforts of U.S. insiders to claim the Constitution as their exclusive property and to deny constitutional rights to aliens and immigrants--and even citizens if they are outside the nation's borders. Tracing such efforts from the debates over the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 to present-day controversies about illegal aliens and their children, the author argues that no human being subject to the governance of the United States should be a "stranger to the Constitution." Thus, whenever the government asserts its power to impose obligations on individuals, it brings them within the constitutional system and should afford them constitutional rights. In Neuman's view, this mutuality of obligation is the most persuasive approach to extending constitutional rights extraterritorially to all U.S. citizens and to those aliens on whom the United States seeks to impose legal responsibilities. Examining both mutuality and more flexible theories, Neuman defends some constitutional constraints on immigration and deportation policies and argues that the political rights of aliens need not exclude suffrage. Finally, in regard to whether children born in the United States to illegally present alien parents should be U.S. citizens, he concludes that the Constitution's traditional shield against the emergence of a hereditary caste of "illegals" should be vigilantly preserved.