Friday February 19, 2021
12:30-1:30 p.m.
Online Zoom Meeting
Dear Colleagues:
Greetings, and I hope you and yours are healthy and safe and able to see some daylight at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel.
We’re still in the tunnel, though, and therefore the “Friday Lunch” continues in its fourth decade as “virtual” Zoom meetings. I miss getting together in person and sharing goodies and side conversations. But so far, mainly because of excellent speakers, we’ve had good presentations and discussions. This week should be a highlight, as we take advantage of Zoom to hear from and talk with our eminent former colleague, Frances Lee.
Frances is simply one of the leading scholars of Congress in particular and American politics more generally, and her research continues to be groundbreaking. In The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era (University of Chicago, 2020), she and her coauthor James M. Curry have mounted a powerful challenge to the conventional wisdom that strong, homogeneous and polarized parties mean that legislation now largely consists of one party “rolling” the other, with little place for bipartisan agreement. They do not argue that partisans are happy to agree with each other, by any means. But they provide good evidence that the parties usually cannot avoid finding a way to deal with each other, if they want to pass legislation at all. This is partly because the structural barriers of the Madisonian design – especially the separate House and Senate – remain serious obstacles to “party government.” It is partly because of the Senate filibuster. And it is partly because, with the majority party usually having only a narrow advantage over the minority in either the House or Senate, the fact that the majority party is a lot more united than it was in the past rarely means it is united enough to legislate alone.
How then does legislation get passed (or not) in the “polarized” Congress? What can party leaders do? And therefore, what should we expect, or at least look for, as the extremely narrow Democratic majorities in the House and Senate now try to address what they view as a wide range of pressing needs? If you’re curious about these questions, nobody in the country could give us better insights into the legislative future.
Signing In
This semester’s discussions will begin at 12:30 p.m., the usual time. The meeting will be set up as from Noon to 2:00 p.m., so people are not all signing in at the same time and to allow for the discussion to run a bit long. Each week we will send out this newsletter with information about the topic. It will also include a link to register (for free) for the discussion. Every Monday the same information will be posted on our website: fridaylunch.case.edu.
If you register, you will automatically receive from the Zoom system the link to join the meeting. This week’s link for registration is:
https://cwru.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEqdOitrDopHtyCfKsOwyDQyKUy77Us-el2
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Please e-mail padg@case.edu if you have questions about how the Zoom version of the Friday Lunch will work or any other suggestions. Or call at 216 368-2426 and we’ll try to get back to you. We are very pleased to be partnering this semester with the Siegal Lifelong Learning Program to share information about the discussions.
Best wishes for safety and security for you and yours,
Joe White
Luxenberg Family Professor of Public Policy and Director, Center for Policy Studies
About Our Guest
Frances E. Lee is jointly appointed in the Department of Politics and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs where she is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs.
Lee has broad interests in American politics, with a special focus on congressional politics, national policymaking, party politics, and representation. She is author of Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (2016) and Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate (2009). She is also coauthor of The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era (2020), Sizing Up The Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation (1999) and a textbook, Congress and Its Members (Sage / CQ Press). Her research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and other outlets.
Schedule of Friday Lunch Upcoming Topics and Speakers:
February 26: Brexit Happened: Now What? With Elliot Posner, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science.
March 5: Effects of the Pandemic on Children’s Resilience and Vulnerability. With Sandra Russ, Ph.D., Distinguished University Professor and Louis D. Beaumont University Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences.
March 12: Dictatorship by Degrees: Xi Jinping in China. With Steven P. Feldman, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus in Business Ethics.
March 19: What’s the Problem With Big Tech? With Anat Alon-Beck, J.D., Assistant Professor of Law.
March 26: TBA
April 2: Student Debt: What Are the Problems? For Whom? And What Could Be Done? With Richard Kazis, Senior Consultant, MDRC, Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, and Board Chair of The Institute for College Access and Services.
April 9: Healthcare, Public Health, and Population Health. With Scott Frank, MD, Associate Professor and Director of Public Health Initiatives, Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences.
April 16: Dropping the Pilot? Assessing Angela Merkel’s Chancellorship. With Kenneth F. Ledford, Ph.D., Chair, Department of History.
April 23: Depression’s Past and Future. With Jonathan Sadowsky, Ph.D., Theodore J. Castele Professor of History.
April 30: The Republican Party and Demographic Change. With Girma Parris, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science.
May 7: Defending Disability Insurance. With Kathy Ruffing, Senior Fellow, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. |
