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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
In honor of Independence Day in the United States, we asked some of our influential American history and politics VSI authors to ask each other some pointed questions related to significant matters in America. Their passionate responses have inspired a four day series leading up to America’s 237th birthday. Today Donald A. Ritchie, author of The US Congress: A Very Short Introduction shares his answers.
By Edward Zelinsky
On 6 May 2013, the US Senate by a bi-partisan vote of 69-27 approved the Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013. The Act would require large, out-of-state Internet and mail order sellers to collect sales taxes, just as brick-and mortar stores must collect such taxes.
In honor of Independence Day in the U.S., we asked some of our influential American history and politics VSI authors to ask each other some pointed questions related to significant matters in America. Their passionate responses have inspired a four day series leading up to America’s 237th birthday.
How did the “textbook” Senate of the 1950s — one of compromise and where people worked together to solve the problems America faced — transform into our current one of gridlock, lack of compromise, and partisan warfare? Sean Theriault, author of The Gingrich Senators: The Roots of Partisan Warfare in Congress, traces the roots of this transformation back to one group of senators, who started in the House of Representatives after 1978, which is when Gingrich joined.
The word diaspora, as explained in the Oxford Dictionaries, is most closely associated with the dispersion of the Jews beyond Israel. However, it is also defined as the dispersion or spread of any people from their original homeland. To learn more about diasporas around the world, we asked Kevin Kenny, Professor of History at Boston College and author of Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction to share some of his extensive knowledge.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down part of the Defense of Marriage Act in their decision on the United States vs. Windsor. The judges also dismissed the Proposition 8 case (Hollingsworth vs. Perry), clearing the way for same-sex couples in California to marry.
By Ian Lloyd
Recent weeks have seen a plethora of media postings concerning revelations about the US government’s systems for obtaining access to communications data. The passage quoted above would seem to fit well into these but actually comes from 1999 and relates to the disclosure of a massive surveillance operation, known as project ECHELON which allegedly allowed the US security agencies (and also those from the UK and a number of other countries) to monitor the content of all email traffic over the Internet.
By Robert J. Hume
The same-sex marriage decisions at the Supreme Court on Wednesday represented important wins for same-sex couples, even if the victories were not quite complete. After Wednesday’s rulings, section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act is no longer constitutional.
By Alexandros Apostolides
Cyprus was not on the agenda of most analysts as the next plot twist in the Eurozone Sovereign debt saga. Although the island nation has been locked out of international capital markets since May 2011, the government of President Demetris Christophias only asked for support from the Eurogroup on 25 July 2012.
By Dennis Baron
Perhaps the highest-profile cases to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court this term are the two involving the definition of marriage. U.S. v. Windsor challenges the federal definition of marriage as “a legal union between one man and one woman” (Defense of Marriage Act [DOMA], 1 USC § 7), and Hollingsworth v. Perry seeks a ruling on the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, a ban on same-sex marriage which reads, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”
By Sarah Jewell, Jim Pemberton, Alessandra Faggian, and Zella King
Gone are the days when all students had to wonder about was how much – or little – effort to put into studying without compromising their chances of getting a degree and walking into a graduate job, thanks to changes in higher education funding and increasing student numbers.
By Mark Philp & Joanna Innes
There are two different questions that might be asked about contemporary democracy: how did we get here? And where else might we have tried to get?
By Michael J. Gerhardt
On Father’s Day, we rarely celebrate presidents, though we could. All but a handful of our presidents were fathers, and our first president, George Washington, is commonly regarded as the Father of our country. While of course nothing about being president necessarily makes anyone a better parent, many presidents have in fact had their legacies largely shaped by their relationships with their fathers and children.
By Christopher Kuner
The recent revelations concerning widespread US government access to electronic communications data (including the PRISM system apparently run by the National Security Agency) leave many questions unanswered, and new facts are constantly emerging. Thoughtful commentators should be hesitant to make detailed pronouncements before it is clear what is actually going on.
Simon Usherwood
To the casual observer of British politics, we would appear to be heading towards a referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU). The Prime Minister has spoken for it, the clamour in the press and in the lobbies of Westminster continues to grow stronger and there is no good reason to speak against it, or so it would seem.
By Roger Wilkins
A significant demographic trend in recent decades, in Australia and a number of other developed countries, has been the growth in lone parent families as a proportion of all families. In 1981, 13 per cent of Australian mothers with dependent children were lone parents; by 2006, this had risen to 20 per cent.