Depressing yet important insights on the state of the union.
A legal scholar presents his solution to today’s crippling political polarization.
Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley School of Law and author of Worse Than Nothing and We the People, points out that the word democracy never appears in the Constitution, and only one of the four institutions, the House of Representatives, “was elected by the people.” Like many other observers, the author considers the Electoral College its most egregious flaw. Because smaller states opposed popular election of the president, the members of the Constitutional Convention compromised by giving each state a number of “electors” equal to its senators and representatives. Since every state has two senators, this gives small states an advantage because presidents are elected by a majority of electors, rather than votes. Twice this century, the candidate who lost the popular vote won in the Electoral College, and this will happen more often as demographic changes continue to concentrate Democratic voters in populous Northern states while Republicans dominate more numerous rural Southern and Midwestern states. Three quarters of the states must approve an amendment to choose a president by popular vote; this is unlikely. Everyone agrees that gerrymandering—drawing electoral boundaries that concentrate the opposing party in the fewest districts—is cheating, but it’s irresistible to the governing party. Some of the author’s suggested reforms, such as eliminating the filibuster or establishing term limits for Supreme Court justices, have modest popular support. Other topics—e.g., the malignant influence of social media or racial justice—are not strictly constitutional issues, but Chemerinsky addresses them nonetheless. His outstanding analysis, however, is not matched by his remedies. He admits that little support exists for replacing the Constitution, and if the political climate continues to degrade, he suggests that secession—hopefully peaceful—between red and blue states is more likely.
Depressing yet important insights on the state of the union.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781324091585
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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