The Substance of Responsive Legislation Sample Clauses

The Substance of Responsive Legislation. The analyses in Chapters 3 and 4 subject the prediction of the separation of powers the- ory that Congress will refrain from passing legislation because of anticipation of negative treatment by the Supreme Court to empirical testing. I hypothesize that the relationships between the preferences of Congress, the preferences of the Court, and the location of the status quo policy systematically influence the probability of xxxx passage generally, and especially when Congress responds to the decisions of the Supreme Court. In Chapters 5 and 6, I take a more qualitative approach to study the nature of congressional responses to the Court’s constitutional decisions. I first consider the substance of legislation that responds to the Supreme Court to assess the effect of responsive legislation on the state of public policy. Second, I ask how the substance of responsive legislation may impact the probability of enactment of a responsive statute. In Chapters 3 and 4, I make no assump- tions about the substance of responsive legislation and do not consider the possibility that different types of responsive proposals face different prospects for success. The anal- ysis in Chapter 5 relaxes the assumption that all responsive proposals are created equal. Finally, in Chapter 6, I conduct an analysis of judicial interpretations of responsive legis- lation to gauge the long–term efficacy of those statutes. These portions of the project are motivated primarily by the work of Xxxxxxx & Ig- nagni (1997) and their claim that a persistent and united majority can be effective at overriding the constitutional decisions of the Supreme Court. I expect that statutory re- sponses to the Court’s constitutional decisions will typically fail to “reverse” the Court’s decisions.6 Like Xxxxxxx & Xxxxxxx (1997), I argue that Congress is able to modify the impact of the Court’s constitutional rulings through the passage of ordinary legislation. Unlike those authors, I argue that congressional responses will frequently fail to reverse the constitutional decisions of the Supreme Court. The crux of my critique is based on the 6For these analyses, I omit congressional responses to the Court’s statutory interpretation decisions be- cause the claim that the Court can reverse those decisions is uncontroversial. disconnect between the characterization of what constitutes “decision–reversal” legisla- tion and the conclusions drawn about Congress’s ability to reverse the Supreme Court. Xxxxxxx & Xxxxx...