01/06/2021
“Professor McConnell’s extensive study of the substance and scope of presidential power under the Constitution has convinced me that the unifying capacity of the Constitution could perhaps be revived.”
Disagreement and deep-seated difference are not alien realities to American political life. From the founding onwards, the United States of America has been replete with divisions running along fraught lines of race, region, religion, ethics, culture, and worldview. In the face of those differences, certain laws, ideas, understandings of our shared past, and even myths have helped to hold us together. Sometimes our bonds of unity have proven insufficient, and a particularly entrenched divide overpowers the normal constraints of public debate and morphs into violence, as was the case with the North-South dispute over slavery and the nature of the Union that culminated in the Civil War.