Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Mackey O'Keefe

Access: Open access

This paper investigates how presidential candidates speak about the Supreme Court on the campaign trail, and how the ideological tenor of their rhetoric influences outcomes on the Court. Rhetoric is a powerful and well-researched tool of the presidency and has often been called “the power to persuade.” Much of judicial politics scholarship works to describe judicial decision making, investigating what constrains the actions and decisions of the Supreme Court. Though some scholarship has examined how presidential rhetoric affects the Supreme Court, little has been conducted in the area of presidential campaigns. This paper argues that presidential campaign rhetoric influences the Supreme Court by demonstrating that in the area of civil liberties the ideology of the winning presidential candidates' campaign rhetoric concerning the Supreme Court has a statistically significant effect on the percent of liberal rulings the Court issues one year after an election.

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Rohini Kurup

Access: Open access

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration decided that suspected terrorists and those determined to have aided terrorists would be detained and classified as “enemy combatants.” This was a largely new category of prisoners who were neither prisoners of war protected under international law nor civilians. They included noncitizens and citizens—those captured on foreign battlefields and on American soil. They would be detained by the United States, held indefinitely without charge or access to a lawyer, and subject to trial by military commission. The administration’s enemy combatant policies were based on a theory of inherent executive power—that the Constitution gave the president vast and exclusive powers, which allowed him to act unilaterally without Congressional interference or judicial review. This thesis charts the development of and challenges to the enemy combatant policies to understand how they were conceived and what their implications are to the American political system. I argue that by appealing to a theory of inherent executive power to create the policies, the administration subverted traditional checks on presidential power and undermined the rule of law. Ultimately, the dismantling of some of the enemy combatant policies, largely a result of court rulings that challenged the administration’s premise of power, signified a reining in of executive authority. Yet, many aspects of the administration’s counterterrorism apparatus remained past Bush’s years in the White House, leaving a legacy of expanded presidential power for future presidents.