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United States. Congress -- Political activity, Presidents -- Political activity, Treaties -- Political aspects, and Free Trade Agreement, 1992, United States-Canada-Mexico

The free trade agreement between the US and Mexico illustrated how Congress can work with the executive branch in coming up with foreign trade treaties for the common good. Constituent pressure can sometimes influence lawmakers but the institution as a whole generally serves as a forum for airing different points of view and not merely the self-interest of individual members. The executive branch also benefits from the expertise brought by the lawmakers and their staffs to the treaty-making process.

United States. Department of Justice -- Powers and duties, United States. Congress -- Powers and duties, United States. Congress -- Political activity, Government attorneys -- Powers and duties, Legislative power -- Analysis, Separation of powers -- Analysis, and Presidents -- Political activity

In understanding the willingness of government lawyers to defend the constitutionality of federal statutes, this article will explain why presidents rarely make use of their powers under the Constitution (allowing the president to refuse to defend laws he finds unconstitutional) and under federal law (placing the control of most government litigation with the attorney general). Attention will be paid both to how Department of Justice lawyers enhance their power by defending federal statutes and to how Congress, if need be, can pressure the department to bow to lawmaker preferences. In consequence, when the president refuses to defend a statute, courts have little reason to disregard article III constraints to resolve constitutional challenges to federal laws.

United States. Congress -- Political activity, Presidents -- Political activity, and Armed Forces -- Mobilization

'Congress, the President, and the Use of Military Force: Cooperation or Conflict in the Post-Cold War Era?' Michael E. Smith also examines how presidents wheel and deal with Congress, concentrating on the decision to use military force. Noting that we have to date little knowledge of the actual conditions under which Congress is likely to challenge a presidential decision to use force, Smith focuses on the partisan incentive to use military force in a divided government environment. He argues that it should be more intense now that the cold war is over. He analyzes House voting on a series of cold war and post-cold war U.S. military interventions. He compares three cold war episodes (the deployment of U.S. forces in Central America during the mid-1980s, U.S. participation in the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Lebanon in 1983, and the reflagging of Kuwaiti oil tankers in 1987 during the Iran-Iraq war) with three in the 1990s (the Persian Gulf War in 1991, intervention in Somalia in 1992-93, and Haiti in 1994). Smith finds that members of Congress have been basing their decision to support a presidential decision to use force on their identification with the president's party. The end of the cold war, then, has heightened the role of partisanship in presidential wheeling and dealing, even in such important and potentially deadly decisions as intervening in other countries with U.S. military force.

United States. Department of State -- Political activity, United States. Congress -- Political activity, and Presidents -- Political activity

'The Politics and Poetry of Advice and Consent: Congress Confronts the Roosevelt Administration during the State Department Confirmation Incident of 1944.' Nicholas Evan Saran takes also explores wheeling and dealing in the Roosevelt administration, but in a crisis that affected the foreign rather than the domestic policy arena. He focuses on a seldom-treated breakdown in congressional relations between the president and a bipartisan coalition of senators determined to play the politics of confirmation brinkmanship. Demonstrating that presidents can be attacked from both flanks, the coalition was led by a group of liberal New Deal senators who claimed that Roosevelt's nominees were too conservative; they were joined by others on the Right who either disagreed with Roosevelt's foreign policy or who wanted to show the president that the legislative branch was intent on having a voice in postwar U.S. foreign policy. Starting in 1943, the conflict came to a head over the confirmation of Roosevelt's nomination of Archibald McLeish as an assistant secretary of state. Through miswheeling and misdealing, the issue became recast, in part, as a battle over which branch of the federal government would control foreign policy, leading to individual votes cast on grounds other than the competence of the nominee. Eventually, Roosevelt broke the deadlock by requesting that his new secretary of state, Edward A. Stettinius, use the president's name in a written note to persuade wavering senators. Franklin D. Roosevelt thus maneuvered to defeat the filibuster that had been mounted against McLeish and other nominees, and to move the nominees forward to confirmation. Biles concludes that while the Senate actions seemed strange to contemporary observers, they made sense from the wheeling and dealing perspective of protecting the legitimatacy of their institutional prerogatives. The confirmation crisis shows that not only is the outcome of wheeling and dealing important; who wheels and deals and the power they wield can be an issue as well.