Seven minutes after President Obama signed national health insurance into law, a lawyer in the office of Florida's Attorney General began a challenge that would eventually reach the nation's highest court. Health care is only the most visible and recent front in a battle over the meaning and scope of the U.S. Constitution. The battleground is the United States Supreme Court, and one of its most insightful and trenchant observers takes us close up....

From renowned political theorist and Pulitzer Prize winner James MacGregor Burns, an illuminating critique of how an unstable, unaccountable, and frequently partisan Supreme Court has come to wield more power than the founding fathers ever intended

"Can the federal government make you eat your fruits and vegetables? Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan seemed to think so when asked if she thought Congress possessed the constitutional power to force every American to "eat three fruits and three vegetables every day." Kagan laughed and said that while it sounded like "a dumb law," that did not make it an unconstitutional one. In other words, if you don't like what your lawmakers have done, take your...

"The Supreme Court serves as the final authority on the Constitution's meaning, giving it a crucial role in protecting individual rights. Its decisions can have an immediate effect on people's everyday lives"--

A growing chorus of officials and commentators argues that the Supreme Court has become too political. On this view the confirmation process is just an exercise in partisan agenda-setting, and the jurists are no more than “politicians in robes”―their ostensibly neutral judicial philosophies mere camouflage for conservative or liberal convictions. Stephen Breyer, drawing upon his experience as a Supreme Court justice, sounds a cautionary note....

"Anthology of diverse viewpoints exploring the Supreme Court's politicization across history, whether it is realistic or useful to expect it to be insulated from politics, and possible means of depoliticizing the court"--

From the publisher. Constitutional Law and Politics, Eighth Edition, has more material -- including case excerpts, concurring and dissenting opinions, and topical introductions -- than any other casebook. Each case is set in its historical and political context, with social and technological factors relevant to the study of Supreme Court rulings noted throughout. Special feature boxes make constitutional law come alive with additional insights on...

Historian Edward Lazarus, a former clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun, guides the reader through the Court's inner sanctum, explaining as only an eyewitness can the collisions of law, politics, and personality as the Justices wrestle with the most fiercely disputed issues of our time.

"A revelatory examination of the conservative direction of the Supreme Court over the last fifty years since the Nixon administration. In the early 1960s, the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren was at the height of its power, expanding civil rights for the poor and minorities and promoting equality in dramatic ways through rulings such as Brown v Board of Education and establishing the "Miranda warning" for persons in police custody. But...

The son of a union electrician and grandson of an immigrant, John K. Delaney grew up believing that anything was possible in America. Before he was fifty, he founded, built and then sold two companies worth billions of dollars. Driven by a deep desire to serve, in 2012 he stepped away from his businesses, ran for Congress, and won. Now he has a new mission: unifying our terribly divided nation and guiding it to a brighter future. As a boy, Delaney...