nan Black

Some Thoughts on the Veto

The American Presidency has exercised an enormous fascination on the minds of historians and political theorists. The result has been an immense literature, with currents and cross-currents of tendency, with evaluation countering evaluation, view neutralizing view. This literature, and particularly its historical component, is often recurred to for the ascertainment of the correct view of presidential power, or for arguments leading to what someone is putting forward as the correct view. This is as it should be. But to me the literature on the Presidency-and most emphatically the historical part-teaches a larger and more general truth. Questions about presidential power have in the past produced different answers in different minds; one can conclude that our own received views are self-evidently right only if one is willing to assert that such minds as those of Madison and J.Q. Adams could not see the obvious, as to something closer to them than to us. I would make the contrary assertion. The history of presidential power is a history of the resolution of doubtful questions that remain doubtful; it is not, as I think some would make it, a history of the gradual acceptance of evident truth. It is a history of the molding and remolding of material of high plasticity, still plastic today. For there is no reason to think that that material suddenly froze hard around about 1950.

Amending the Constitution: A Letter to a Congressman

There was introduced in the Senate, in the 92d Congress, a bill (S.215)1 dealing with the procedures to be followed on state applications for a national constitutional convention pursuant to Article V of the Constitution. The bill passed the Senate2 but was still in the House Judiciary Committee when Congress adjourned. While it was there, I wrote the following letter to Congressman Emanuel Celler, then Chairman of the Committee, giving my reasons for believing that the passage of a bill such as S.215 would be a national calamity. The letter is reproduced here because I believe the profession ought to be exposed to a full spectrum of opinion on this major question. There is another reason for its reproduction at this time. The Harvard Law Review, in a student Note,3 has taken issue with some of the conclusions expressed in the letter. On full reconsideration, I must say that I do not think the authors of this Note have laid a finger on me, but I prefer that the profession be the judge of that, by having access to my own expression of my views, rather than by seeing them through the semi-opaque pane of paraphrase and selective quotation. I consider it inappropriate at this time to accompany the letter with specific answers to the Harvard Note; in sum, I feel the