The general constitutional authority of the President to veto legislation passed by Congress has recently received renewed scholarly attention. However, few studies have focused on the pocket veto—the power to negate proposed laws sent for approval without the possibility of reconsideration—and its ramifications for presidential effectiveness. This research comprehensively investigates the creation, development, and employment of the pocket veto. First, this article will trace the history of this form of executive prerogative from colonial times through its establishment in the Constitution. Second, it will review the use of the pocket veto in the nineteenth century. Third, it will undertake a seminal empirical probe of influences on public-bill pocket-veto frequency from 1889 to 1989. Fourth, I will delineate congressional and court challenges to the use of this executive device. In the final section, I will assess the consequences of heightened consternation over pocket-veto use.

“ERA Won't Go Away!” The words were chanted at rallies and unfurled on banners at countless marches as the deadline—June 30, 1982—approached for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. To include in the Constitution the principle of equality of rights for women, supporters insisted, was an essential of republican government in a democratic society. Congress had shared that perception in 1972, passing a series of measures aimed at strengthening and expanding federal legislation banning discrimination on the basis of sex. Included was a constitutional amendment simply stating that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.” Thirty-five of the thirty-eight states necessary for a three-fourths majority needed to amend the Constitution had given their approval.

Recognizing public education as a public good, policymakers have focused on providing those with direct interest in public schools opportunities to influence educational policy making. In the nineteenth century, this often meant providing women the right to vote on and to hold public school offices. Frequently conflated, suffrage and public office holding are actually two different, yet related, citizenship rights. Using state and territorial legislative records as a starting place, this article redefines the understanding of school suffrage by complicating the traditional narrative relative to its relationship with full woman suffrage. In doing so, it also provides evidence that before 1900 women were granted the right to hold public education offices, ultimately being elected in forty-three of forty-eight states before the twentieth century, thus broadening the understanding of women’s political agency prior to attaining full suffrage.

With the 2008 Democratic National Convention slated for Denver, the libertarian concerns of Western voters, denizens of the so-called purple states, are suddenly of high interest. Pundits and commentators see in the “live and let live” ethos of the West a chance for the Democracy to reshape its faltering coalition and enter the twenty-first century rejuvenated and strong. Ryan Sager, a critic from the right, notes that from the Democratic perspective, “the West looks abundant with opportunities. And the same might be said of a long-neglected, long-suffering political demographic: libertarians.” This optimism in part underlay the party's choice of Denver over the traditional Democratic bastion of New York. Colorado is often identified as a libertarian-leaning state, and it was where the Libertarian Party was founded. But what exactly is libertarianism?

At one time, political science greatly influenced the writing of American history. Pioneers of “the new political history” brought critical elections theory, roll-call analysis, the idea of party systems, and a model of ethno-cultural voting to bear on the Jacksonian era, the problem of the coming of the Civil War, Gilded Age politics, and Progressivism in ways that permanently altered interpretation. The influence of political science is not very great now. Political history itself shriveled before the New Social History. Massive energies were applied to writing the history of people who could not vote during most or all of the nineteenth century. The old political models soon had a nonbehaviorist rival, born and bred within the discipline of history itself, the idea of a persistent and transforming “republican ideology,” first and most powerfully described by Bernard Bailyn in 1967. Even within political history, the old models of voting behavior borrowed from political science left an implausible and unsatisfying gulf between voting and platform, political behavior and belief, practice and ideology. The disciplines turned inward again.

Thomas Philpott, in his pioneering study, The Slum and the Ghetto, argued that housing reformers were paternalistic, that “regulating tenant conditions … involved regulating the tenement dwellers.” In particular, he pointed out the problems with housing laws that seemingly improved the quality of housing for the poor by setting minimum standards. Instead of improving conditions, however, these regulations simultaneously raised the price of new housing beyond what immigrants and poor workers could pay, while also destroying those buildings, no matter how troubled, that they could afford. In other words, middle-class housing policy, while well intentioned, had a negative impact, because it failed to consider the needs of the population or to provide affordable substitutes for the housing that was eliminated.

The third Conservation movement was summoned to life between Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring (1962) and the Santa Barbara Oil Spill at the end of the movement-spawning Sixties, and would be called by a more nature-evoking term—environmentalism. Looking back from there, those of us with some historical memory were struck by how far we had come from the first Conservation crusade led by John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and Gifford Pinchot, or the second led by FDR in the 1930s. In those early days they thought the problem was loss of forests, soil erosion, water and air pollution, and that the solutions were National Parks and National Forests watched over by civil servants in their gray or tan-brown uniforms, along with a Soil Conservation Service for farmers.

During the early months of 1919, the term “Reconstruction,” of concern to few but historians and the friends and foes of D.W. Griffith in the years immediately preceding the Great War, was again on the lips of Americans. Alabama State Federation of Labor President, William L. Harrison, noted that “Since the signing of the Armistice, and the cessation of hostilities, the questions of reconstruction and re-adjustment are being diligently studied by the people generally.” Out of the war, he argued, came “new and progressive ideas on reconstruction.” He was right. As the war ended, dozens of books and articles bearing titles like Reconstructing America, Democracy and Reconstruction, and Social Reconstruction joined a new journal called Reconstruction: A Herald of the New Time. This literature celebrated the role that a strong federal government had played in helping workers secure the right to join unions during the war, and it laid out hopeful plans for what the government might do to solve the “labor question” after the war. Such ideas helped convince Harrison's counterpart, Florida State Federation of Labor President John H. Mackey, that the postwar era would bring “a silver ray which carries with it wondrous tidings for the uplift of the masses.”

In 1920 the Pennsylvania Railroad sued several small coal companies over water pollution. The lawsuit, ultimately decided in the railroad's favor, overturned an earlier Pennsylvania court decision that granted a property right to pollute, and, more important, now represents a major transitional period in American water policy history. The period marked the end of water policy generated from court decisions and case law, and the beginning of an era dominated by legislative statute and agency interpretation. With the Pennsylvania case, the impacts of nineteenth-century court decisions that sanctioned pollution to encourage business waned as concern for the nation's public health demanded more expansive attention, and industry itself began to experience excessive costs from corrupted water resources. In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, lawmakers attempted to institute a new strategy for economic interest in harmony with efforts to improve environmental quality.