This chapter introduces a novel dataset encompassing 731,810 witnesses across 74,077 House, Senate, and Joint standing committee hearings held between 1961 and 2018. The dataset includes comprehensive details such as witness names, organizational affiliations, hearing summaries, committee titles, dates, and bill numbers discussed. The chapter describes the meticulous construction process, emphasizing the extraction of key variables focusing on witness affiliations, affiliation type, and gender. With eighteen categorized affiliation types and nine broader parent categories, this classification captures the diverse spectrum of external groups represented in congressional hearings. The chapter also provides rich descriptive statistics on hearings and witness over time and across committees.

Chapter 5 examines the intent for a legislative hearing and how it affects a committee’s selection of witnesses. Committees, guided by the partisan goals of the committee chair, seek different types of information depending on whether they are considering specific bills in hearings. When the chair has not yet advanced a bill through the committee process, it gives the committee more political flexibility to hear from those who can provide expertise in policy development. Consistent with this argument, we show that committees turned to think tanks, universities, and bureaucrats – witnesses who can provide more analytical information – at higher rates for hearings without a bill (nonreferral hearings), when committees hearings to learn about an issue area. Committees tended to invite witnesses from mass-based groups, such as labor unions, trade associations, and membership associations, at higher rates for hearings on a specific bill (referral hearings). Different witness compositions between referral and nonreferral hearings suggest strategic choices of the identities of witnesses and thus the types of information that the committee hearing generates.

This chapter describes two areas of legal theory that consider when means-based adjustments to legal rules may not be desirable. Under one perspective, means-based adjustments designed for redistributive purposes should be reserved for the tax system alone, since introducing means-based adjustments to other legal rules would entail greater efficiency costs. A second literature considers the desirability of a legal system that is impartial, nondiscriminatory, and general in its application. Subjecting taxpayers to different legal rules based on means could also undermine these important criteria. This chapter considers how means-based adjustments to the tax compliance rules should be evaluated from each of these perspectives, and why they would be justified even in cases where means-based adjustments to other legal rules would not be.

What are the weaknesses of the current tax compliance rules, and how can these rules more effectively address the challenge of high-end tax noncompliance? This chapter first describes the limitations of the traditional responses to tax noncompliance in the law and in prominent reform proposals. It then introduces a new approach: a system of means-adjusted tax compliance rules. As we argue, this approach can both complement the traditional responses to noncompliance and counter their limitations to build a more robust and effective tax compliance system. The final section of this chapter describes how introducing means adjustments to the tax compliance rules would not be a radically new direction for tax reform, but rather an extension and rationalization of principles that are already embedded in the current tax law.

Tax-information reporting is an essential element of the tax compliance system. Despite the power of tax-information reporting to maximize the IRS’s ability to collect taxes owed, these rules also contain significant gaps. High-end taxpayers can often earn their income through transactions that do not require a third party to file tax-information reports with the IRS. This chapter demonstrates how the activity-based approach to information reporting often allows high-end taxpayers to engage in noncompliance with the tax law, while other taxpayers face significant automatic IRS scrutiny. It also shows that the government’s approach to tax-information reporting applies almost exclusively to specific activities, ranging from methods of earning income to designated transactions. This approach is consistent with the government’s design of other tax compliance rules that apply to certain types of activities, such as the use of tax shelters, offshore bank accounts, and transactions lacking economic substance to avoid tax liability.

This chapter outlines our book’s contributions to understanding how partisan incentives drive the information-seeking behavior of Congress and its committees. Moreover, it underscores the challenge legislators face in balancing their political roles with the need for expert insights. In this final chapter, we relate our arguments and findings to recent challenges Congress has faced in seeking information in its partisan environment. We propose new lines of research that build on our data and work in our book and emphasize the connections to long-standing issues in American democracy. Our book, empirical evidence, and accompanying analyses promote a new understanding of the dynamics underlying the acquisition and dissemination of information in Congress and, we hope, will stimulate further inquiry into the role of information in shaping public policy in a democracy.

Chapter 2 delves into the critical role of congressional hearings and witnesses during the committee stage, emphasizing their significance in shaping legislative outcomes and policy formulation. It explores how hearings serve as one of the prime avenues for information gathering, drawing from previous studies to highlight their impact on communication among legislators, interest groups, and bureaucrats. The chapter unpacks the intricate process of selecting witnesses, elucidating the process of inviting individuals who provide members of Congress information during the committee stage. It underscores the choices and variables present in this selection process – such as expertise, ideological leaning, and organizational affiliations. Ultimately, this chapter serves as a comprehensive primer on the process of witness selection for congressional hearings and describes the pivotal role played by witnesses in a key stage of policymaking.

Chapter 5 recounts the 2nd Texas’ first battle experience at Shiloh and the subsequent allegations of cowardice. It explains efforts by the men to defend themselves, as well as their supporters. Their Col. John C. Moore filed multiple reports to explain his unit’s actions the second day of the fight; their Lt. Col. William P. Rogers vowed to prove his men’s valor.

Chapter 1 introduces our idea that group-based inequality is in large part the result of anger constraints placed on disadvantaged groups. We use research in social psychology to understand how public expressions of anger are reserved for the powerful. We develop a theory of how group-based social hierarchies in society are maintained by instituting rules of who can express anger and who cannot. We provide several examples of how United States race relations between Black Americans and whites exemplify this “anger rule.”

This chapter explores symmetry’s implications for the law of democracy. Symmetry has obvious relevance in this area, given the centrality of election-related disputes to maintaining courts’ political neutrality. At a minimum, symmetric interpretation should encourage the Supreme Court to ensure greater consistency in its emergency orders blocking legal changes before an election. In addition, symmetry may help justify the Court’s controversial decisions leaving both partisan gerrymanders and choices about overall districting procedures to the political process. In combination, if not in isolation, these rulings are symmetric because they avoid constitutionalizing one position or the other on politically charged questions about appropriate criteria for districting. Finally, symmetry should support closer scrutiny of voting rules and procedures with skewed partisan effects, provided that challengers can convincingly establish a meaningful impairment of political competition.

This chapter addresses symmetry’s implications for gun rights and unenumerated fundamental liberties. Although recognizing an individual right to bear arms is inevitably asymmetric given current divides over gun regulation, the Supreme Court might moderate its decisions’ asymmetry in two ways: by allowing some meaningful room for firearms regulation, and by ensuring that the Second Amendment sometimes interferes with laws that are conventionally favored more by conservatives than by progressives. With respect to unenumerated rights, symmetry should support embracing some method for identifying such rights that avoids any predictable skew toward rights favored by one or the other major partisan or ideological camp. The Court’s current method of looking to “history and tradition” to define unenumerated rights could satisfy this standard, provided the Court applies it in a manner that allows recognition of new rights based on enactment of new laws over time in jurisdictions across the United States. In addition, the existing constitutional protection for parental rights, meaning parents’ authority to control key aspects of their children’s upbringing, appears not only defensible under the Court’s “history and tradition” approach but also symmetric given major current divides over certain parenting choices.