This chapter examines the capacity of the Federal Executive Government to spend money. The ability to spend is important to the functioning of government because of the need to pay public service salaries and to the implementation of government policies because many policy areas require large amounts of spending. Consistent with principles of responsible government, public funds are subject to parliamentary control through two constitutional requirements. First, all government revenue must be held in a single Consolidated Revenue Fund. Secondly, funds in the Consolidated Revenue Fund can be accessed only if appropriated by law. Funds that have been lawfully appropriated from the Consolidated Revenue Fund may be expended by the Federal Executive Government only if some law authorises that expenditure. Parliament also has power to grant funds to States on such terms and conditions as Parliament thinks fit. This power is regularly used to pay the States to implement policies that the Commonwealth lacks constitutional power to implement itself.

The fiscal system of the United States exacerbated the COVID-19 pandemic. The United States makes decisions about how to allocate resources using a fiscal system that assumes a baseline of private ownership from which Congress may depart by generating “revenue” and appropriating funds to the executive branch to spend for a specific purpose. This chapter describes three aspects of this allocative framework that contributed to the country’s tragic failure to meet the coronavirus challenge. First, scorekeeping, the process for predicting what legislation will “cost” and what it will “save” to meet the political desire to minimize the need to borrow. A decade before the coronavirus pandemic the Affordable Care Act created a significant “Prevention and Public Health Fund,” but as Professor Westmoreland first documented, Congressional scorekeeping rules that treat preventive investment as worthless encouraged Congress to “raid” the fund to spend on purposes other than public health, which it did. Second, Congress’ reliance on short-term appropriations to retain influence over the executive branch. Although essential to the separation of powers, the parasitic power of the purse and its insistence on short-term spending packages repeatedly stymied and hobbled federal relief with short-, medium-, and long-term impacts on the nation’s health and economic wellbeing. Third, the executive’s asymmetric discretion over spending. The president’s discretion to refuse to spend made it possible for President Trump to frustrate the efforts of Congress to continue the country’s support for the World Health Organization by declining to allocate appropriated funds for the organization in the midst of the pandemic.

This essay assesses the challenge of digital culture to the representation and reproduction of Chaucer’s work, arguing that scholarly projects associated with the emergence of ‘digital humanities’ have in the main replicated the humanist goals of traditional literary scholarship. With the rapidly changing nature of digital textualities, the essay concludes by suggesting that a proper reckoning between Chaucer’s works and digital culture has yet to take place.

However well-regarded Chaucer’s works were during his lifetime, it was his immediate successors who fashioned him into the ‘father of English poetry’ they then bequeathed to the subsequent English literary tradition. In particular, the poets Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate not only represented Chaucer in this manner in their own, widely disseminated works, they were also instrumental in the broad dissemination of Chaucer’s works. Importantly, these activities were motivated not just by admiration but also by a politico-literary context in which Hoccleve and Lydgate, unlike Chaucer, were asked to produce works that spoke both for a prince and to a prince. Their invention of Chaucer’s literary authority cannot then be separated from their intervention into politics, and this conflation they also bequeathed to the English literary tradition, where it remained plainly visible in the works of their own successors, and where it persists, more obscurely, to the present.

Calls for a return to a traditional method of lawmaking known as “regular order” have proliferated as unorthodox lawmaking has grown more dominant in Congress. Proponents claim regular order enhances deliberation on legislation. This chapter examines deliberation under one form of regular order: open rules permitting unlimited amending in the House of Representatives. We find evidence of substantial minority influence on the inputs and outputs of the appropriations process. Regular order gives the minority party members the opportunity to present and win adoption of their policy proposals. Our evidence also shows that ideological extremists play an outsized role in debate. They offer more amendments than other members, and their amendments tend to win less support and face defeat more often than moderates. The paradox of regular order is that it simultaneously offers the opportunity for bipartisan deliberation over legislation while exposing the majority party to problems that may make its management of the floor more difficult.

Calls for a return to a traditional method of lawmaking known as “regular order” have proliferated as unorthodox lawmaking has grown more dominant in Congress. Proponents claim regular order enhances deliberation on legislation. This chapter examines deliberation under one form of regular order: open rules permitting unlimited amending in the House of Representatives. We find evidence of substantial minority influence on the inputs and outputs of the appropriations process. Regular order gives the minority party members the opportunity to present and win adoption of their policy proposals. Our evidence also shows that ideological extremists play an outsized role in debate. They offer more amendments than other members, and their amendments tend to win less support and face defeat more often than moderates. The paradox of regular order is that it simultaneously offers the opportunity for bipartisan deliberation over legislation while exposing the majority party to problems that may make its management of the floor more difficult.