This book covers the role and duties of the executive in the office of President, describing how those duties have changed and evolved throughout the history of the United States, and details the election process, from the caucus to the Electoral College,.

Examines the operation of the Judicial Branch and its role in government. Shows how it interprets our laws and how it makes decisions that impact the daily lives of citizens. Also examines how it contributes to the system of checks and balances which prevents any one branch of the U.S. government from becoming too powerful.

Justice Breyer discusses what the Court must do going forward to maintain that public confidence and argues for interpreting the Constitution in a way that works in practice. He forcefully rejects competing approaches that look exclusively to the Constitution's text or to the eighteenth-century views of the framers. Instead, he advocates a pragmatic approach that applies unchanging constitutional values to ever-changing circumstances--an approach...

Conventional wisdom holds that 9/11 sounded the death knell for presidential accountability. In fact, the opposite is true. The novel powers that our post-9/11 commanders in chief assumed--endless detentions, military commissions, state secrets, broad surveillance, and more--are the culmination of a two-century expansion of presidential authority. But these new powers have been met with thousands of barely visible legal and political constraints--enforced...