Joseph W Postell

Current attempts to improve civic education through higher education should be supplemented by a focus on political parties, which have traditionally served as the “great schools” of civic education. America’s nineteenth-century parties drew voters out of their private concerns, engaged them in social life, and taught them to tolerate and bargain with each other. Legal changes over the past century have deprived them of the tools needed to fulfill this role. Policymakers should reconsider campaign finance laws that cripple parties, especially state and local organizations. Moreover, parties themselves should dedicate more time and resources to building a permanent presence in local communities and engaging citizens on the ground.

Congress is in limbo. It is no longer the bipartisan, collaborative, participatory institution it was during previous eras, and neither is it the top-down, “czar”-driven institution that it was when political parties were at the height of their power. The public’s frustration with Congress during the Cannon years created the opening for the Revolt of 1910 that gave power over to the committees. Subsequently, the public’s frustration with that system led to the reforms of the 1970s that both decentralized power to subcommittees and centralized power in party leaders. Where we go from here will depend on how well we understand and implement the lessons of history, which makes the examination of Congress’s evolution indispensable.

Scholars and commentators across the ideological spectrum are preparing themselves for a possible revival of the nondelegation doctrine. Nevertheless, there are clear signals that a change is on the horizon. In one of the most recent major cases involving the conventional nondelegation doctrine, Gundy v. United States, three Justices signed an opinion by Justice Gorsuch advocating the abandonment of the Court's "intelligible principle" test adopted in 1928 in J. W. Hampton, Jr. v. United States. Instead, the Justices urged the adoption of a more robust limitation on congressional delegations of authority to administrative agencies. Indeed, in many of the states that, in practice, have relatively robust nondelegation doctrines, the test employed resembles the Supreme Court's current "intelligible principle" test.

"From the founding, Americans' contests over the Constitution and what it should mean for their actions have profoundly shaped the country's political direction. With a cast of characters ranging from Montesquieu, Adams, and Henry Clay, to the transcendentalists, Cherokee freedmen, and modern identitarians, this book brings an interdisciplinary group of scholars to the task of forwarding discussion on American political thought and American political development. The result is a volume raising as many questions as it answers, especially about the themes of membership and civic virtue"--

When the modern administrative state emerged in America during the Progressive Era, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was typically grounded on the premise that administrative officials are experts who should be insulated from politics. This theory, combined with emerging ideas of scientific management, contributed to the intellectual justification for the administrative state. However, progressives never fully reconciled the tension between this theory and the democratic nature of American politics. Because of this ambiguity and tension in the progressives' theory of expertise, the politics/administration dichotomy was abandoned shortly after the administrative state was constructed. The place of expertise in the administrative state is still ambiguous, even in the twenty-first century.