The process of how to amend the U.S. Constitution is the least discussed and least examined aspect of the Constitution. The vagaries surrounding the amendment process were highlighted in 1992 as the Twenty-Seventh Amendment gained momentum and eventual ratification.

Compensation of Members of Congress: The Twenty-Seventh Amendment

As one of the original proposals accompanying the Bill of Rights, and first proposed in 1789, the congressional pay raise amendment was included in order to limit the ability of Congress to change the compensation of its members. It was proposed by James Madison and later passed by both houses of Congress. The amendment stated: “No law, varying the compensation for the services of senators and representatives, shall take effect until an election of representatives shall have intervened.” Three state conventions, concerned that members of Congress might arbitrarily grant themselves salary raises, proposed that no salary improvements should occur before the next election of representatives (Livingston 1956).

The current Canadian constitutional crisis has many roots: the alienation of the western provinces, the increasing difficulties of the federal government in funding poorer provinces, aboriginal renewal, the intrusion of a Charter of Rights and of a powerful Supreme Court into a parliamentary Westminster system. But only one factor challenges the unity of the country: Quebec secessionism.

Quebecers have freely elected pro-Canada politicians since the beginning of the federation in 1867. Their situation cannot be compared with new democracies issued from decaying totalitarian regimes, like the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, or Czechoslovakia. The Quebec question bears more similarity with the re-emergence of pro-autonomy movements in some West-European countries. But neither Scotland, Catalonia, nor any other region in Western Europe is as likely as Quebec to become an independent country in the near future. Quebec is a striking case that may have important leading effects on what will happen in Europe.

Why in this era are many Quebecers so nationalistic that they wish to exit from a country that is envied around the world? Secessionist movements are rooted in two antithetical feelings or incentives shared by any linguistic, religious, or ethnic group looking to leave a union. First, is a fear of being weakened or even of disappearing as a distinct people if the group stays in the union. Second, is a confidence among the group that it can perform as well, or even better, on its own and that the secession is not too risky. A third feeling of rejection, the sensation of no longer being welcomed in the union, may also occur. Secession is most likely to take place when these feelings are all at high levels.

When you're stymied on the measurement of one of your critical variables, put that project aside and write another essay on what Thucydides really meant (Singer 1975).

The trouble with Classical Realism is that it is difficult to distinguish … dialectical insight from a refusal to define concepts clearly and consistently, or to develop a systematic set of propositions that could be subjected to empirical tests (Keohane 1983).

In the study of ancient Greek democracy, Thucydides' account of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians surely deserves a privileged place. As a cardinal instance of the genre Hegel (1975, 14) called original history, Thucydides' work provides a uniquely direct point of contact with Athenian democracy in its most radical and imperial—phase: the chief figures of that work “express the maxims of their nation and of their own personality, their consciousness of their political position and of their moral and spiritual nature, and the principles that underlie their designs and conduct.” Thus, from Thucydides we get much more than a reconstruction of events. We also get access to the ancient Greeks' own understanding of the world they made and destroyed.

One of the most important responsibilities that I have as an American National Government teacher is convincing my students that the rudimentary characteristics of civitates (the art of government) may be found in virtually all levels of community life, and that the health of our democracy depends on an educated public which can be depended upon to act with civic responsibility. But it is obvious to me that my students are torn between the appreciation and pursuit of democratic ideals—individual rights, liberty, justice, equality—and a burning conviction that politics has about as much to offer as the plague.

Substantively, the American Government course begins with a suggestion on my part that as we approach the 21st century many Americans find contemporary life to be complex and hostile. It does not take much effort to convince a class that we face many serious problems: economic uncertainties; never-ending international crises; social divisiveness that splits us into different factions hostile to one another; and, perhaps most disturbing, the distinct possibility that as our leaders, our political parties, and even our constitutional system fail to cope with these problems, the United States is becoming ungovernable.

In the constitutional referendum held on October 26, 1992, Canadian voters said “No” to a constitutional package, the “Charlottetown Accord,” contrived explicitly to win pan-regional support. Instead, it evoked pan-regional opposition.

The package Canadians rejected was formidably complex. It became so by a decade's accretion of elements, each calculated to appeal to, or to offset concessions to, groups excluded at an earlier stage—Quebec, the western provinces, and aboriginal peoples. Negotiators hoped that by 1992 they had finally found an equilibrium, a logroll sufficiently inclusive to survive referral to the people. Instead they seem to have gotten the logic of the logroll upside down: they may have overestimated both how much each group wanted what it got and how intensely some groups opposed key concessions to others.

Quebec. At the heart of the package were proposals contrived to induce the political class of Quebec to acquiesce in the political settlement embodied in the Constitution Act, 1982. Although the government and legislature of Quebec had rejected the 1982 settlement, no one contested that it applied to the province. But many agreed, on grounds of either justice or expediency, that the pill had to be made less bitter. The first attempt to bring Quebec on side was the Meech Lake Accord, struck in 1987 and buried in 1990. The failure of this attempt was the immediate background to the 1992 events.

In the last 40 years, universal recognition of the Supreme Court's important policy-making role, the prevalence of divided government, and heightened conflict over value-laden issues such as abortion and school prayer have led to ever more elaborate Senate review of Supreme Court nominations (Freund 1988; Ross 1987, 116-23). Senate hearings into nominees' views on constitutional issues comprise the most visible element in the expanded confirmation process. Yet most recent nominees have won Senate approval while revealing little of their legal or political philosophies. As Powe (1976, 893) has concluded, “Senate questioning [of nominees] has proved astonishingly ineffective in eliciting the desired information.” The ability of nominees to hide their beliefs on vital constitutional questions raises serious doubts about the Senate's ability to give informed consent to presidents' Supreme Court nominations.

This article examines confirmation hearings on recent, pre-Clinton Supreme Court nominees to answer two questions. First, given the recognized importance of Supreme Court appointments and the correspondingly systematic scrutiny of nominees, how do nominees get away with revealing so little of their views on vital constitutional issues? Second, given the answers to the first question, can the hearings be reformed so that senators may air a nominee's views more thoroughly and give—or withhold—truly informed consent to these nominations?

This note questions both some of the premises and some of the conclusions of Theodore J. Lowi's diagnosis, in the March 1992 American Political Science Review, of the state of the political science discipline. Since I am given a prominent, if undeserved role, in his analysis of historical trends, perhaps I may be pardoned if it begins by refuting that part of his argument.

Surely one should feel great (and devilish) delight at learning that one has exercised diabolical influence over the shaping of political science. Alas, I am wholly lacking in the power that Professor Lowi attributes to me in his paper. Alas also, if I were armed, my gun was not aimed in the direction he supposes it was. I am not at all in sympathy with the Third American Government whose (confused) economics-based ideology he presumes I created, as anyone will recognize who has read the foreword to the recent re-issue of the Simon-Smithburg-Thompson textbook, Public Administration, or the earlier work, Administrative Behavior (AB), or the more recent Reason in Human Affairs. Are these books written so obscurely that Professor Lowi could not see that the rationality celebrated in them (if any rationality is celebrated at all) is a weak, muddled, bounded rationality that is rejected out of hand by the economists who espouse public choice and neoclassical laissez-faire theory?

The Freedom of Information Act was conceived in partisan planning, went through its gestation period immersed in public relations and saw the light of day in 1966 because of a political deal. But that's all right. The same process 200 years ago developed the Bill of Rights with its First Amendment guarantee of freedom of expression—a freedom which becomes an effective tool of democracy when citizens, using the Freedom of Information Act, can find out what their government is doing.

A bill of rights to protect citizens against government excesses was proposed in the closing days of the Constitutional Convention but was voted down by those delegates, including James Madison, who saw the move as a political ploy to block the plan for a strong federal government (Madison 1987, 630).

Madison almost lost his race for a House of Representatives seat in the 1st Congress because his opponent, James Monroe, raised the issue of Madison's vote against a bill of rights in the Constitutional Convention (Rutland 1987, 308). Madison promised to work for a bill of rights if he was elected; he kept his promise, demanding that the 1st Congress give as much attention to protecting citizens' rights as to creating the agencies of the new government and solving its monetary problems.

People worry about the public-relations presidency: an institutional pattern of action giving high priority to public support, especially as shown by the opinion polls. These worries have been accentuated by actions in the White House and news media. “I don't live by the polls,” Bush told reporters early in 1990, parrying the implication that he did live by them. Daily polls that benefitted the White House were taken during the six months before the Gulf War by the Wirthlin Group (Ronald Reagan's second-term pollster) on behalf of “Citizens for a Free Kuwait.” These included very sophisticated tracking and feedback devices. Bush, in fact, became the first president to mention his own popularity polls in a State of the Union address in January 1992. Yet, Bush could as well have accused reporters of living by the polls. Each change in his public approval ratings was accompanied by featured news stories. At the close of the war, even before the planes had returned to their bases, commentators began speculating on how soon the president's popularity would fall.

Several things stand out from Bush's approval ratings in his first three years in office. His polls were strikingly high in absolute terms and relative to the polls of his predecessors at the same points in their administrations. Another notable feature was that they were more erratic. Where Reagan's polls changed by more than five percentage points only twice in the same period, Bush's changed by this amount 13 times, leading modern presidents in this kind of fluctuation. Bush's approval ratings climbed with the invasion of Panama in January 1990, fell the next month, and then fell further.

Just nine days after what was to have been a routine confirmation hearing, John S. Arnick, a 23-year member of the Maryland House of Delegates, withdrew his name from consideration for a position on the Baltimore County District Court. Arnick became the first gubernatorial nominee for a judgeship since 1968 who did not receive confirmation. This event touches upon a number of underlying subtexts of interest to political scientists, especially those who follow state legislatures and their processes—judicial confirmation procedures at the state level, prevalence of “insider-vs.-outsider” mentality within a state legislature, persistence of sexism in the environment of a state capital, impact of women legislators on the political culture and procedures, citizen attentiveness to the political process, and the consequences of the growing use of radio shows and telephone calls to influence the actions of elected officials.

Dear Professor Simon:

It is an honor to be read, and read carefully, by someone of your distinction. But since you missed the major premise of my March 1992 essay, it is virtually impossible to engage in a point-by-point rebuttal. In fact, few of your propositions I'd care to rebut, not only because they are irrelevant to my argument but also because I tend to agree with you. After all, I am a product of your work of the 1940s and early 1950s, as I am of the writings of the various Chicago political scientists you singled out for praise—having read their every word, including yours, and having studied with some of them as a student and served with some as a colleague. I contributed to the revival of Gosnell's Machine Politics—Chicago Model with a foreword (1968), in which I said, among other things, “It is a masterpiece in the imaginative use of aggregate data in the study of political phenomena. A direct predecessor to the work of V. O. Key, this study is unexcelled to this day as an effort to understand political behavior in its institutional setting” (vii).

The European Community (EC) is poised between 31 December 1992, the target date for the completion of the internal market, and the coming into force of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union (TEU) upon ratification by Germany. The TEU presents integrationists with the constitutional structures for a decisive move to federation whose legal foundations currently run far deeper than popularly represented. Consequently there is urgent need for informed public participation in the shaping of European structures. Furthermore, there is growing discussion in the EC institutions on proposals for a European Constitution directly enacted by Union citizens. At the same time, the recent currency upheavals culminating in the weakening of the exchange rate mechanism raises questions of the stability of the EC's foundations. This article aims to provoke debate by raising arguments on a series of issues in the light of the legal approfondissement and in reaction to it. Section I summarizes the constitutional advance of the EC prior to the TEU towards the legal system of a federal nation. Section II raises the issues of spill-over, nationalism, democratic deficit, debate, referenda, social marginalization, and rights in the light of this undiscussed approfondissement.