AAL

When two equally strong/powerful forces fight it out, the truth, or the “correct answer” will emerge. (Query: what happens when the two sides are not equally matched?)

323 million people, 50 states plus Puerto Rico, Guam, D.C. That’s 38 times more people than CH, 4 times more people than Germany.

Really 11 different cultural/geographical regions:
12 percent African-American/Black
16 percent Latino
1 percent Native American
5 percent Asian
percent biracial
13 percent foreign born (might or might not be citizens)

By 2050, US will be “majority minority”, meaning “people of color” will be in the majority. People of color are people whose ancestors are not of European descent.
US is very religious, compared with Europe:
69 percent Americans believe in God
45 percent Protestant, 20 percent Catholic
7 percent Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, or other

1607 Jamestown settlement
1620 First slaves
1776 Declaration of Independence
1787 Constitution
1791 Bill of Rights
1808 Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
1839 Trail of tears
1849 Gold Rush, Chinese Migration
1861-64 Civil War
o 620,000 men died, in comparison to 644,000 in all other U.S. wars combined
1863 Emancipation Proclamation
1865 Reconstruction
1868 14th Amendment
1899 Annexation of Guam, Philippines
1914 World War I
1920 19th Amendment
1929 Stock Market Crash, Great Depression
1941 Pearl Harbor, US enters WWII
1945 Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
1950 Korean War, Cold War
1954 Brown v. Board of Education
1955-1973 Vietnam War
1960 Civil Rights Act (1950-1960 Civil Rights Movement)
1972 Watergate
1991 Gulf war
2001 September 11th
2009-2017 Obama
2017 Trump

We are all refugees and immigrants.
2. We fled religious persecution and extreme poverty in Europe.
3. Religious freedom is really important to us. We are in many ways a religious people.
4. We revere the Constitution. We treat it almost as if it were sacred.
Summary Notes Lectures MT
17. November 2018 Page | 7
5. The Constitution is what unites us. We are not a nation based on blood lines or tribes. We are people from all over the world, united by the constitution.
6. Role of violence in U.S. history – sometimes violence is a necessary evil.
7. Legacy of racism – remember that more of U.S. history has involved slavery (250 years) than has not (155 years). Slavery existed at the time of the Declaration of In-dependence (“all men are created equal”) and at the time of the Constitution. Slavery is considered the “original sin”.
8. History of independence, local control and isolationism.
9. We are the “new world”/the future, in contrast to “the Old World.”
10. “Best nation on Earth.” “God bless America.” “Promised Land”
11. “Pull yourself up by your bookstraps” – any individual can rise from poverty to wealth in the “land of opportunity.”
12. Deep skepticism/fear of “socialism”; economic “freedom” and individual freedom from government “interference” is revered. Communitarian values (everyone has a place in society) as in Europe relatively not valued.
13. New is good! Innovation is good!

The Constitution sets forth the structure of the government, among other things.
Per the Constitution, there are three co-equal branches: the Legislative Branch (Article I of the Constitution), the Executive Branch (Article II), and the Judicial Branch (Article III).

The legislative branch consists of the Congress. The Congress has two chambers.

One is the Senate. The Senate has 100 Senators - 2 from each of the 50 states. They serve for 6 year terms. The tiniest state (Rhode Island) has the same number of Senators as the most populous state. (California). Thought question: We usually cite the “one person, one vote” principle. Does it bother you that the votes of people in less populous states “count more” than the votes of those in populous states (as the number of people represented by each U.S. Senator varies widely, depending on the population of the state)?

The other chamber is called the House of Representatives. There are 435 members. States with more people have many more Representatives than those with fewer people. Each dis-trict represented is relatively small. Members of the House of Representatives are elected every 2 years.

There are no term limits on Senators and Members of the House of Representatives. This means that they can serve as long as they like, as long as they keep getting re-elected. “Member of Congress” can refer to either Senators plus Representatives or just Representa-tives. It depends on the context. Elections are staggered, for stability purposes. So every two years, all 435 Members of the House of Representatives are up for re-election, but only ⅓ of the U.S. Senators are up for re-election.

The President (see more below) is up for election/re-election every 4 years. This means that halfway through his term, there are what we call “midterm” elections. The next midterms are in November 2018 - you will see in the papers that Americans are very interested in the out-come of these midterm elections. Why? Because midterm elections are often seen as a “ref-erendum” (metaphorically, not literally) on how people feel about the President. If they are happy with him, his part will get or keep the majority of seats in Congress. If people are not happy with him, his party will lose seats.
There are 2 major political parties in the U.S. We will talk later about why there are only 2. There are the Democrats and the Republicans. Historically, the Congress has usually been pretty evenly divided - 48 percent v. 52 percent, for example. This means that it is hard to get a supermajority. (More on “supermajority” below).

It’s the job of the legislative branch to pass the laws. There’s lots of different ways you can say this, e.g. the legislature writes/passes/makes/creates the laws/legislation/statutes. These words mean essentially the same thing. The type of law they make is called statutory law (as opposed to Constitutional law, or common law, or regulatory law).
How do they make a law? A bill (a proposed law) must win a majority of votes in both houses of the legislature. In most cases, it doesn’t matter where it goes first, except for strategic rea-sons. It can go to the Senate first, or to the House first. If a bill gets a simple majority (more than 50 percent) of votes in each house, then it is sent to the President.

The President has the right to veto a bill. If he vetoes a bill, then it does not become law un-less Congress overrides the Presidential veto. To override a Presidential veto, Congress needs ⅔ of votes on both Chambers. Historically, Congress has been able to override only 10 percent of Presidential vetos. Why? Because a supermajority, that is a majority vote over more than 50 percent - in this case ⅔, is very hard to get.

The President

The President is the head of the Executive Branch. You can think of him a bit like the “CEO”. Underneath him work tens of thousands of federal employees. He appoints the heads of the Executive Agencies, of which there are many, each with a different subject matter (e.g. Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, etc.). He can fire the heads of many agencies. Some agencies are “independent” - we will talk about who the President can and cannot fire in more detail later in the course - for now, just accept that he is the Chief Executive Officer, meaning he is responsible for making sure the people below him “execute” (put into effect) the laws. The President is also the Commander in Chief of the military. The President also makes certain judicial appointments, which must be approved by the Senate. We have NOT talked about this process at all yet, so we will come back to it later.
We discussed in class how the President has the authority to prevent bills from becoming laws (through his veto, unless it is overriden), but how the President does not have affirma-tive authority to pass or make the laws. This is a key concept. It is the Congress that writes the laws! A student in the first class raised an excellent question: “Well, what about Executive Orders”? Fantastic question. We will return to this question later in the class. For now, just recall the brief discussion we had about what a President will be tempted to do when he can-not persuade Congress to pass the laws he wants. When they don’t listen to him, he will of-ten try to “legislate” or enact policy through executive orders. Is this Constitutional? For ex-ample, what about all of Obama’s Executive Orders in the immigration context?! This is a huge question, and we will need to come back to it later in the course when we know more. At this point, please just recognize why the student asked the question - if the legislature is supposed to legislate, and the Executive is supposed to execute, an Executive Order that looks like a law should at least raise some questions in your mind!
The President’s term is 4 years. Per a Constitutional amendment after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a President cannot serve more than 2 terms.

These are the federal courts. We often call them Article III courts. We have not yet discussed their structure. Nor have we discussed at all how judges are appointed -topics for a later day. For now, what you need to know is that the judiciary is independent! This is a key principle.
The President cannot fire a federal judge, even if he would really like to. The Congress can-not fire a federal judge. A federal judge has what we call lifetime tenure. That means that no matter how unpopular their decisions are, they cannot be fired. They can only be impeached (or die), and impeachment is an extremely rare and difficult process, reserved for only ex-treme circumstances. We can talk about impeachment later, but for now, it’s fair to assume that a judge will not be impeached unless he’s caught taking a bribe or killing someone or committing another very serious crime.