Joining the Party, Part 1 (LAW-CONST2)
This lecture addresses the paradox of a two-party system unmentioned in the Constitution. It explains how original presidential rules courted disaster with emerging parties, leading to the Twelfth Amendment. It interprets later amendments, from Reconstruction to women's suffrage, as products of partisan practice.
The Constitution never mentions political parties, yet the two-party system is as fixed a feature of America as the Mississippi River. Akhil Reed Amar explains the paradox.
This lecture shows how the original presidential rules, where the runner-up became vice president, courted disaster once parties emerged, as the Adams-Jefferson contests of 1796 and 1800 revealed. Amar traces how the Twelfth Amendment rebuilt the system for two parties, and reads the later amendments, from the antislavery Reconstruction measures to women's suffrage and the twenty-second and twenty-fifth, as products of partisan practice.