 My name is Rachel Sinichop. I'm the Program and Development Coordinator here at the Library. I have a fan club. Thank you. Tonight's program is part of a series called Constitutional Crisis, and tonight's specific program is on the powers of the presidency. This is a series with the Vermont League of Women Voters, and the moderator this evening is Marilyn Blackwell. She's a historian and writer from East Montpelier. She will introduce tonight's speakers, and please help me welcome Marilyn Blackwell. Thank you. As you know, most people call me Lynn. I'm a member of the League of Women Voters, and the president of our local chapter is here, Kate Raider. No, am I right, Kate? Kate's responsible for organizing this panel. Right. Anyone can join the League if you're interested. We are committed to empowering voters and defending democracy. That's our mission. We're nonpartisan. And this is part of our educational effort. Orca is filming the program tonight. So I will introduce the panelists, and then they will have a chance to give you some introductory remarks from their various perspectives on presidential powers. And we also have some questions that we circulated among them prior to tonight's meeting. So we'll get to those after. We have about an hour for discussion, and then at 8 we would welcome your questions for the panelists. So with that, our first panelist is Lisa Holmes. She is an associate professor of political science at UVM. She specializes in judicial politics, constitutional law, gender and law, and American politics. Her research focuses on various issues surrounding the politics of appointing federal and state judges. So she's going to fill us in on the relationship between the president and the judiciary. Matt Dickinson is a professor of political science at Middlebury College. He joined the faculty in 2000 and teaches courses on American politics, the presidency, and the politics of Congress. His current research, make sure this is right, Matt, focuses on recent presidents, advisers, and presidential decision making. And Peter Teachout, you may have seen before. He's a professor of constitutional law at Vermont Law School. He is recognized for his expertise in regarding constitutional law and history of Vermont and the United States. He's working on a biography of a original Vermont term, Thomas Reed Powell. He's from Richard, is that right? Who was raised there and became a leading early realist and critic of the court during the first half of the 20th century. So I think Peter will go first and give you some introductions, which I guess is on this outline. Is that correct? Okay. Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here. I'm impressed by the joy out on the right as frosty as this. It's always been a great turn out here that I'm particularly impressed that you're out here tonight. I have distributed a brief outline of the comments that I'm going to make about which I'll have something to say in just a moment. But also the second page is a copy of article two of the Constitution which deals with executive power or presidential power. And we may have occasion to take a look at that in the course of the comments and discussions this evening. Page one is just simply a brief outline of my comments. My responsibility this evening is a double one. One is because we're all here in some sense perhaps because we're concerned about or puzzled by the extent to which presidents including the current president seem to be making all sorts of decisions that you might think may properly ought to belong to the legislative branch. And this is an abuse of executive power so the first part of my comments is going to be just to provide the most basic outline of the allocation of decision making power, law making power between the executive branch and the legislative branch in our constitutional system. The second part which will be quite brief is just to try to provide a little bit of historical context. What would the issues that were raised at the constitutional convention in the summer of 1787 respecting the power that a president ought to have in our constitutional system. So with that introduction why don't we just get started. First of all some of this is very elemental it's very important. It provides a basic framework to which we can recur in deciding whether the president is abusing executive power or is not abusing executive power. Basically as you know there are three branches of government. The legislature is supposed to make law the president is supposed to execute or administer the law that the Congress has made and the judiciary then will decide what controversies and cases involving the law that's been made. So if the legislature is supposed to make law how come we find that presidents regularly make law as well. Well there are three basic circumstances under which the president of the United States is authorized to make law. The first is when the Constitution in particular article two of the Constitution gives the president the power to make law. For example the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces and in that capacity he has considerable discretion about making important decisions without any kind of restraint by Congress. Okay? Congress has powered the purse but the president can make decisions as commander in chief without needing any special authorization other than the authorization in the Constitution itself. So that's example one. The second circumstance is when the president is authorized by statute to make law. And Congress is perfectly free to say this is a problem that's going to come up on a regular basis. We can't constantly stop what we're doing and deal with those problems. We're going to delegate to the executive branch the power to adopt regulations to implement regulations to make interstitial decisions that we don't want to be troubled with but we will provide the president then with a delegated power to make law. That's when the president has power because the statute authorizes the president to do that. For example, I'm just trying to think of an example to prevent some of the president's decisions regarding immigration policy. Congress has probably told the president in a statute the president may determine under what circumstances the immigrant should be barred from entering the country and under what circumstances those immigrants should be allowed to enter the country. Congress can do that. Then the president has the authority then to make those determinations. The third example or the third circumstance is in certain circumstances when there's an emergency situation and there's no express constitutional provision giving the president power to deal with the emergency. There's no statute that expressly gives the president the power to deal with the emergency but in some circumstances unless Congress has specifically denied the president the authority to act the court is held the president has the power to deal with an emergency when it arises without any special authorization either by statute or by constitutional provision. President Truman tried to use that in 1952 when he basically issued an order aimed at stopping the striking the steel industry. He did so in a way that was in conflict with what Congress had decided so we didn't get away with it but that's an example of an emergency situation during the Korean War dealing with the striking the steel industry. An example where the president might be able to act in an emergency. So there you are just three situations you've got to find an authorization in the Constitution you have to find an authorization in a statute or it has to be an emergency situation. There's one other complication there are lots of complications but there's one other major complication which is that there are a number of matters that the Constitution doesn't address dealing with relations with foreign countries and there the court has said generally speaking the president has broad authority to act in making decisions affecting our relations with other countries with foreign relations without express authorization in either the Constitution or in a statute. So that's it. Now if it doesn't fit into one of those categories at least generally speaking the president does not have authority to make law. Okay? So that's the basic framework. Now historical context very briefly. We need to remember that from the time of the Declaration of Independence 1776 until the Constitution is ratified in 1788 there's a period of more than a decade when the national government in this country was governed by something called the Articles of Confederation. Under the Articles of Confederation it was a congress that went annually but there was no executive branch there was no judicial branch there was no president. So when the framers met in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia this whole business of creating a president creating an executive branch was all brand new there hadn't been one at the national level there had been experience at the state level but no experience at all at the national level and every single aspect of presidential power was up for debate. It wasn't something that we spent consistent time on but from time to time they recurred to the question should there be a president? What powers ought he to have? And that's how we get Articles 2 of the Constitution. Now hanging over that whole debate was a concern that we create a president with extensive powers it's going to be like recurring to the old system of a monarchy something that Americans have fought to free themselves from. That's the one concern on one hand on the other hand there was a feeling that this congress wasn't capable of dealing with all sorts of problems that come up from day to day there wasn't an executive to provide what the framers called energy or direction it really needed an executive branch that could provide energy and direction to the country and that Congress basically implement close policies by passing laws so it was that tension the tension between having a strong executive that would have energy and direction that it took to move the country forward on the one hand with a concern that they didn't want to create a strong executive because it meant sort of going back to all the problems that they had suffered with the monarchy before the revolution itself so the big question is what kind of controls can we put over the exercise of executive power but at the same time create an executive branch that could have strength and independence and energy to act and carry the country forward and so here were the questions and I will just tell you what the questions are they were very elemental should we have one executive or should we have two or three some of the framers that summer thought we ought to have more than one executive maybe it's a good idea to have three but others said boy you get three executives out there they'll always be at each other's throat it will lead to paralysis you really need to have just one president but that's a very elemental question isn't it? how many presidents do you want to have? what about term limits? should there be term limits? some of the framers argued there ought to be just a single term you know what? anybody to be sitting around accumulating power over time some of you may have seen the musical Hamilton Hamilton stood up and made a beautiful maiden speech didn't convince anybody it was a very beautiful speech but he argued and ought to be appointed for life so long as he was during what he called good behavior something that he really carried all the way back to the notion this is really as one of the framers said the fetus of a monarchy if we go that far so what did they end up with? they ended up with an agreement to allow the president to have a term that he debated about the number of years some thought two or three years was long enough others thought he needed really six or seven years and they ended up with four years to have a term but to be reelectable not to be limited to a single term so these are the kind of very fundamental debates they were having at the convention and if you look at article two you can see what they said about them what about veto power? should it be absolute? some of the framers stopped the president on the power of veto and legislation passed by congress other framers said now that's giving the president way too much power it ought to be a cause like veto which meant that if the president vetoed those measures then congress by a supermajority could override that deal which is what they eventually settled for what about treaty making and appointment powers? should the president have absolute expression to enter into treaties and to appoint cabinet officials and to appoint members of the supreme court? do you know what the answer was? does the president have absolute power to propose treaties which have to be subject to the consent and approval of the senate and to nominate top-ranked government officials and supreme court justices but again subject to the consent of the senate should the president be impeachable? this might be a current issue okay they have to decide whether the president should be subject to impeachment and they finally did decide as you can see in the very last provision under article two of the president under certain circumstances high crimes and misdemeanors should be subject to it but every one of those are very fundamental questions that the framers had to address during the convention of 1787 and then finally they had to how are we going to elect this guy? should congress basically vote to decide who should be president? should the governors and the states decide who should be president? do you know what we settled upon and what the framers settled upon? what? in an electoral college I'd like to know because it's the most educated provision in article two but it's a system of electrical electrical electoral college in which each state basically has the same number of electors as it does senators and representatives and they get together and then they had to deal with the problem of what if nobody gets the majority? what if there's a time? all of those questions are very fundamental and then we get what we get in article two you can see it's very, very, very bare bones what are the president powers if you look at article two and I'm just going to leave it here there the president is charged with executing the law what does that say? what does that mean? the president is charged with making sure that the laws are faithfully executed what does that mean? the president is is designated as commander and chief of the iron forces there's a very specific grant of power to the executive the president has the power to make certain kinds of appointments but subject to congressional approval so very bare bones provision compared with for example article one which gives a detail list of the powers that the congress can exercise so what are the implications of that? the implications are that I think justice Jackson once said trying to figure out the powers of the president he's like trying to figure out what was it that tried to decipher the meaning of the dream of the pharaoh it was as any I think probably not the right word but it's a mysterious process it's possible and when we reach Supreme Court decisions we find that the justices sort of line up along the spectrum some think the president ought to have broad powers and they've got room to say facts with the framers gave the president others say we're really concerned about a president but abuse is executive power and you find also justices at that end of the spectrum and they tend to read the constitutional mandate very different so there it is very simple it's all there you can read article two you aren't going to find very much I always like to think it's like a cupboard you go to the cupboard you find the cupboard in there there's three or four statements that indicate what the presidential powers are and that means future generations really have a lot of latitude in making those decisions so who goes next thank you Peter welcome and thanks Lynn, thanks Kate, thanks Rachel thank all of you for coming out on such a cold day and what I have to say will probably make you feel a little more cold we are in a period in which this Peter is laid out in which the constitution is not necessarily providing a very effective guide for resolving conflicts and on the parties we see this of course with government shutdown and we often focus on the characters involved in the current scenario so Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House Mitch McConnell who is the majority leader of the senate of course President Donald Trump but I want to argue that the crisis that we're facing right now is actually rooted in developments that predate the current presidency and in fact I will say Donald Trump is as much a symptom of some underlying issues as he is a cause of those and we're in a period in national politics right now that we have not seen since the reconstruction really three primary characteristics here one, our political parties politically, particularly at the elite level that is the level of national elected representatives are deeply polarized and that polarization pervades everything that happens in terms of filling in the gaps that Peter has very heartfully laid out here in the constitution those unspoken interstices in the language second that polarization is not shared by most people in the public most people are not wedded to the ideology of the Democratic left or the Republican right and I'm not going to bore you with a lot of survey detail but on issue after issue we ask people where they stand if we give them enough choices most people stand pretty much in the middle ideologically and as a result they don't feel that the parties are representing their views most people would like to see compromise they don't like to see this shutdown and third the parties are highly competitive we have entered a period when neither party is able to win over a majority of public opinion this is like a new deal when the Democrats dominated more or less popular opinion for the 1930s and 1960s or when the Republicans dominated from 1896 up to 1930s neither party has been able to win as evidence when you think about majority control of our three major national institutions the presidency, the house and the senate there's eight different permutations that you can have the parties and the three institutions we've actually cycled through seven of those possible eight configurations since 2000 and if the Democrats win the senate in 2020 we'll have done all eight in other words the public can't make up its mind who it wants to govern it essentially doesn't like any particular configuration for very long and it says let's try another one so what does this have to do with the topic for today presidential power there's everything to do with it presidents are elected promising to do things I'm gonna build a wall, Mexico will pay for it and then they get into office and they find out for the reasons that here so the framers did not give them complete power at least not across the floor that power share under the constitution and they look to the legislature to accomplish things but the legislature sees no incentive in working with the other party because they share no common beliefs both parties are deeply polarized there is no middle ground that they're willing to come to an agreement on and so instead all they're interested in doing is sort of staking out their ideological position hopefully that will be rewarded by their voters in the primary and their campaign donors those small issue activists that put in their $15-$20 and a margin that will enable them to govern unilaterally and as a result nothing happens unless you have a super majority and you control all three branches of government and that rarely has been the case in recent years and so the president finds out soon enough he cannot do nearly what he thought he was going to do and so what's the alternative if I can't work through congress there's no incentive for legislators to come together on agreement for instance to fund the government what do I do I try to achieve things unilaterally I try to achieve things administratively I try to use executive orders I try to issue directives to the executive branch agencies I hope the courts will back up what I want to do I want Lisa to talk about that but there are two problems with this approach to government one is it de-legitimizes the role of congress congress isn't very happy when the president says I'm going to do things with a stroke of the pen because you're not willing to act and one way congress reacts of course is by bringing court cases or people bring it on behalf so we often find the judiciary becoming involved in the legislative process it also means that the president's effort to forge agreement to get short-circuited when you legislate you must compromise you must build coalitions when you act unilaterally there's no need to do that you just try to assert that what you want should be what the government should do and you make no effort to bridge differences with the opposing side and so there's no incentive for that side to come in support which you are trying to do instead there's every incentive for that side to try to block what you're doing unilaterally the second reason this is a very bad strategy in addition to sort of undermining the shared powers in the legislative process is it's not very effective we've seen this for instance with Barack Obama issuing DACA deferred action for childhood arrivals or DACA deferred action for the parents of immigrants who have legal status I'm not sure that's the acronym properly but he did this because he did not get congress controlled in part by the republicans to agree to comprehensive immigration legislation so he said I'll do it with the stroke of the pen that was wonderful as long as he was in power once he left his replacement Donald Trump said hey I have a pen and I'm gonna wipe that out and he repeals the issues in administrative order essentially repealing DACA he's repealed temporary protection for immigrants who are coming here seeking asylum and so it's not a way to forge durable coalitions this acting unilaterally so there's two problems with it it undermines the constitutional process of lawmaking delegitimizing the role of other players and it doesn't work not at least in the long run and we're currently involved in a shutdown and this is rooted in disagreement over immigration well we've been fighting this same battle back to Ronald Reagan's years but if you think about George Bush George Bush in 2007 forged what he thought was a consensus between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans on immigration he basically said I'm gonna trade off border security which the Republicans want we're the pathway to citizenship which is what the Democrats want and he never even came up for a vote Congress, the Senate Philip Buster it reviews to go anywhere and who blocked it conservatives in his party liberals in the Democratic Party did not want to grant what they saw was not going far enough to a pathway to citizenship Republicans said it's amnesty you're allowing illegal immigrants to status when they haven't earned it and so they got torpedoed from both wings of each party and we're seeing this again I have no doubt that Nancy Pelosi would love to come to the table and try to strike a deal with Donald Trump but she would be attacked by her progressive the Ocasio-Cortez and so on who would want to see nothing like compromise with Donald Trump and similarly the Republicans we think Nancy Pelosi is struggling with her progressive, willing of her party she almost didn't get chosen as speaker because of this her predecessor, Paul Ryan and his predecessor, John Boehner had problems with the conservative caucus who torpedoed efforts to come it's not simply the fact that the leadership isn't willing to compromise but they are they pay a huge political price here they risk losing their leadership position it's a scary thing to be a leader and look behind you and there's no one following there's no one following and that's partly what we're seeing here today so the key point I want to make here is we often view this current period of polarization as an aberration in American politics Trump is sort of driving this he's a divisive polarizing figure all that may be true but the reason he's president now is this disproportionate number of Americans felt neither of the two existing parties were representing their interests nothing was getting done on the issues that they wanted to see addressed and so they said I'll take a flyer on a guy who has no political experience at all but maybe just maybe he can break the log jam here and of course we've seen someone predictably that hasn't happened and I'll leave it at that Lisa Thank you, thank you as well everybody for coming and for the organizers thank you Lynn and Kate and Rachel I studied the judiciary but I'm a political scientist so I come at this from a somewhat different perspective than I suspected that in many circumstances Peter does and so I'm going to just provide some general overview of what I see is the judiciary's role here and the pros and cons of thinking about what kind of power the judiciary might have in reining in the contemporary American president one thing I think that is worth mentioning right out of the gate is that the power of the judiciary especially the US Supreme Court has increased quite tremendously over time but that being said the judiciary is still hampered by some inherent weaknesses in its place in the American political system in terms of separation of powers and balances and I'll touch on a few of those things since I make some of these preliminary comments here for for opinion on this topic I thought it might be a good useful way to think about the judiciary's role in two different kinds of cases there are very typical cases where the judiciary is ruling on the outcome of a president's policy preferences so for example in the judiciary it has ruled or it is in the process of ruling on things like Trump's policies with respect to transgender troops in the military for those of you who paid a lot of attention to today's news you might be aware that the judiciary has begun to the process at least the Supreme Court has begun the process of ruling on that policy preference other examples of this during the Obama administration for example the judiciary reigned in his power in the example of a presidential policy with respect to carbon emissions from coal plants so that's one kind of category of cases and I could talk further about some of those sorts of cases but I wanted to also give some attention to the less typical examples of when the judiciary including the Supreme Court might step in and rule on the power of the presidency per se Peter talked about one of those cases a classic case that's getting an awful lot of play these days is the Umstown Sheet and Two case otherwise known as the Steel seizure case during the Truman administration we have other examples of these kinds of cases some during the Lincoln administration I can talk about some others of these but there's a case from last year that I wanted to tell you a little bit about and it was quite a bit lower profile than some of these big blockbuster cases that you might be thinking about but I think it tells us something important about the judiciary here and in terms of how this administration and some recent presidential administrations in general have been approaching this topic and it has to do with another power that Peter mentioned which is the president's ability to make appointments there was a case in the court stock that last year called I think the name was pronounced Lucia versus SEC I'm not even sure how to pronounce the litigants name is I think an indication that this was a somewhat lower profile case I'll try not to get into the technical weeds on this but it was a case dealing with administrative law judges and the security and exchange commission so you know not a a high ranking case in terms of salience in the American public and the issue in the case was whether the appointment of these administrative law judges who were appointed through kind of typical civil service appointment protocols in the SEC violated the appointments clause in the US Constitution so why am I bringing this kind of low profile somewhat technical case up with all of you I'm bringing it up because to me what was fascinating about the case was how the justice department handled it this case started during the Obama administration and as you would expect during the Obama administration the justice department supported the SEC and how it had been appointing these administrative law judges then you get a new president with a new solicitor general the solicitor general is the office that office in the justice department represents the federal government in front of the US Supreme Court President Trump's solicitor general has completely changed approaches in this case and suddenly through his support behind the competing argument saying that the way that these judges are appointed is unconstitutional so first of all this doesn't happen in such blatant ways all that often and it might sound kind of counter intuitive why would the federal government's own attorneys be arguing that how the federal government appointing these offices violated the constitution that's the interesting part about it the second thing that the solicitor general's office did in this case was even though the US Supreme Court had only said we're going to rule on this narrow question of how these administrative law judges are appointed the president's solicitor general tried to get the supreme court to also rule on the president's power to remove these offices so why might they have done that this was widely reported as being tied into the Mueller investigation in terms of the president's administration trying to kind of glean a little bit their ability to push the envelope not just on appointing people to various executive agencies but also to remove them at the will of the president but I'm not sure, I don't know why the solicitor general changed tax completely like this and tried to broaden the issue in front of the Supreme Court but I want to throw one other possible reason onto the table and it could be because this idea of investing more power in the president not just to appoint but also to remove people in his administration is sort of part and parcel with a theory that has gotten some play in recent Republican administrations called unitary executive theory which is this idea that all of the executive power as highlighted and glad that Peter circulated article 2 for you so you can see that the executive powers are all provided to the president and the president alone so I think that was just one little example in a case that otherwise was not really worth a heck of a lot of our time and attention of how important these issues are and how various actors in this separation of powers gained between the president and Congress perhaps might look to the judiciary to help bolster their arguments. The one last point that I want to make here and I'll try to make this as simply as possible is pulling back a little bit on perhaps your expectations with respect to the proper role of the judiciary here and let me just point out a few things and then I'll send it back to Lynn. First of all, one thing to keep in mind is that the judiciary does not see for themselves a proper role in resolving every possible dispute. To give you one example that maybe doesn't have so much to do with the topic of the day on presidential power is the question of partisan gerrymandering. I'm going to presume that everybody knows what I'm talking about here. It's the drawing of legislative boundaries to benefit a particular political party. What is being litigated before the U.S. Supreme Court write this term on this question is whether it's even appropriate for the judiciary to weigh in on this question at all. There are some questions for which the judiciary does not really see themselves as having a proper role. Another classic example of this is the impeachment stuff. Where questions about impeachable offenses or impeachment protocol is not usually something that the judiciary wants to or likes to weigh in on. I could make a little just quick aside here that among my professional circles, the judicial politics people, a whole lot of attention now is being given to Chief Justice John Roberts. And whether his status as the Chief Justice of the Federal Judiciary is giving him in particular some pause before throwing his vote behind weighing in on some of the most controversial issues of the day. As Lynn said in her introduction my particular area of expertise is judicial appointment politics so I always have to throw a little of that in here too. So the other thing I would say is in terms of any of these kinds of cases cases dealing with the policy implications of a powerful president or cases dealing with the power of the presidency in and of itself one thing to keep in mind is that the composition of the judiciary is changing on not quite a daily basis but pretty close to a daily basis and just to give you some numbers to back this up I've got this in here somewhere within the first two years of his administration alone President Trump has appointed nearly 100 people to the Federal Judiciary including 30 court of appeals judges and just to give you some context for that that is about 17% of that court. President Trump appointed in two short years. He also successfully appointed just over 60 district court judges those are those trial court judges on top of course of the two supreme court justices that he's already appointed and when the last congressional session ended there were nearly 100 judicial nominees waiting in line. The normal practice is that all of those get sent back to the president when the congressional session ends my expectation is that the president will just send them back to the senate. So I think the last thing I would put on this is depending on which side of this you look at it or how you would prefer these cases to be resolved be careful what you wish for because the more things get thrown to the judiciary keep in mind that the composition of that institution is changing rapidly too. I will leave it at that. Well thank you all I think there's a lot of meat there and I know you all probably have questions so let's hold them for just a minute and I just want to try and follow up with some of the issues that the league came up with that we thought it would be a timely it would be a good time to ask these experts and I want to tap into what Alisa was saying these all I think relate to this unitary executive concept right and one of the questions we had come up with was we hope that you could elaborate on the president's national emergency powers because this has been there's been many commentators about this issue so let's just see who of you would like to address that issue and in what circumstances there's been legislation on national emergencies perhaps you could fill us in on the background of that and then the historical evolution of this particular power that the president can claim. Let me start by making a very big distinction the president has no powers to act in emergency because congress has given the president the power to act in emergency congress may pass a law for example saying certain countries may experience natural disasters the president shall have the power to determine whether natural disasters happen and if that determination is made he may allow those people to become temporary residents of the united states until the disaster is over that's right there in the statute we've been feeling a static order responsible why because congress can't go around it and spend all of its time figuring out whether natural disasters happen and so on and so forth the other circumstance is where congress has not addressed the question but an emergency arises and in that case you'll find a court all over the place in determining whether or not the president has the power to act but generally speaking the president may act but there's no legislation as long as congress has not specifically prohibited the president from acting so that gives the president broad authority to act in emergencies where there's no legislation that covers the situation I don't know what the story is on the wall between Mexico and the united states whether there is legislation giving I suspect there's legislation giving the president some power to act in an emergency but I'm not really sure the question for the courts I suspect Lisa would be in that case whether the president is advocating an emergency to justify what he's doing and they either should defer to that or they shouldn't defer to that so yeah I will just second that by saying that I don't completely know the answer to that either right I actually kind of have expected that to have happened by now if for no other reason then it seemed to be a viable way to throw this to the judiciary the question of the wall and in the meantime it would kind of allow the pressure to be taken off the government to be reopened thanks to move on as the judicial wheels grind somewhat slowly as they tend to do I think the only thing I would add on to this from what Peter said the times of actual emergency are when the judiciary doesn't tend to act at its best the Korematsu decision immediately comes to mind that the judiciary does have a tendency to be more deferential during those periods now I can't think of an example of where the judiciary had to resolve is this the actual crisis that we're being told I guess there's a slight corollary in a case called the prize cases during the Civil War when the Supreme Court had to rule on the constitutionality of some of Lincoln's actions before any declaration of war had been given but that's not the same thing as what we're talking about here it was easy in that case for the Supreme Court to conclude we are clearly in a period of crisis how they would muddle through that in this circumstance I cannot answer I'm going to move on this leads right into another one of our questions and perhaps Matt you want to address this in terms of the president's war powers now Congress has a relationship here with respect to the war powers do you want to elaborate on any restrictions on that or if there are any any restrictions with respect to specific like nuclear issue when he's attempting to use nuclear power I'm going to defer back to Peter and Lisa that's because they both lay out when Congress only learned is when Congress has a specific statute on the books presidents generally limited in what they can do based on what that statute says when there's not it really comes down to politics so when there is an emergency and there's no clear guidance from Congress you often see the president trying to push the envelope as far as they can and tell somebody pushes back when we saw this after 9-11 with George Bush and holding enemy combatants without any legal recourse whatsoever there is a willingness on Congress's part to sort of defer to the president at least initially and then ultimately to court cases as that immediate crisis sort of receded we see normal politics reassert itself in some cases court cases work through President Bush was forced to establish a go back through Congress and sort of establish some rights for representation for enemy combatants so you know I'm like Lisa not like Lisa I'm not nearly as focused on the legality here as what the politics will allow in the area of foreign policy we have seen instances in which Congress has tried to reassert through the war powers act for instance to slatedly reclaim their powers that they've given away politically and we found that those were power that legislation has proved to be something with dead letter because they lack the political will to back it up so it's never really been invoked in any way that's meaningful you all place yourself in the middle of the Civil War Lincoln is considering whether or not to not be emancipation proclamation does he have the power to do the free the free the slaves and the still rebellious southern states Congress had not authorized him to do that do you think he ought to have that power but what power did he invoke do you think he invoked the war power right the power of the president as commander in chief but it was a questionable constitutional decision pushing the limits of the powers that the commander in chief should or it does have there's another example so I just want to add one thing it's just kind of rounding out an example that Matt brought up which had to do with the court's role in the war on terror with respect to the holding of non-american enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay as Matt noted initially the U.S. Supreme Court put up a little bit of a fight on this and in a series of cases told the Bush administration you've got to provide some sort of legal recourse for these folks but what's actually really interesting about those cases is that in the years since then the U.S. Supreme Court seems to have completely backed off and let those cases be resolved by the DC circuit court of appeals with the seemingly the government winning almost across the board whether that backing off is because membership changes or that it's not a really comfortable place for the judiciary to be going up against the sitting president for a prolonged period of time over an issue of national security is not where the Supreme Court usually likes to be. Okay, one more question we had was with respect to the president's pardon power and are there any restrictions in that? I'm going to give it to you straight. Through section two the president shall have the power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States except in cases of impeachment. Okay? How's impeachment? Well it just says you have to, you have to accept in cases of impeachment so if he were to be impeached from impeachment the answer seems to be he doesn't have the power to pardon in cases of impeachment it doesn't say who is subject to impeachment. It also says for offenses against the United States so you know what that means you do if you happen to be a member of the state legislature in New York you make crimes by the president crimes against the state of New York and then the president does not have the power to issue pardons only power to issue pardons in cases of offenses against the United States violations of state law doesn't have the power to grant pardons Let's see here with respect to international trade what are what is the relationship there between the legislative branch and the executive branch in terms of we know certain treaties are approved by the senate but there's a lot of leeway there what is the current status of the president's ability to impose tariffs or to make the new trade agreements trade agreements I'll give you a general answer which is congress is very interested in trade policy more so and less willing to defer to the president on trade policy and national security because it has distributional consequences it affects their constituents in some regions more than other regions and the congress simultaneously is recognizing that as the 535 members they're good at negotiating trade deals so in sort of the aftermath of the depression they said you know until this point we have been the ones that created tariffs and it just turned into a giant log role in which a lot of protective tariffs were passed that you'd sort of had a total impact we're not very good for the economy so they said to the president listen we'll defer to you allowing you to trade trees and we'll even give you fast-track authority so that when they come back to us we'll tie our hands behind our back and we can either vote up or down on this trade authority well that trade authority has been rescinded because congress decided they didn't want to be stuck in a position where the president could force them so in theory congress if they could summon the political will has a much greater political incentive to weigh in on issues like tariffs but you know again it's the question of whether they can summon the political will to do that they have rescinded fast-track authority as a matter of constitutional law congress has final say over commerce among the several states and with foreign nations now what that has just said is congress has that authority, they exercised it and gave the president certain kinds of powers but that was because congress decided to do so but the constitution is very clear that congress wants to exercise regulation over interstate trade whatever form that takes congress has got constitutional power to do so trumps the trumps well I think we should get to your question so yes the president is commander in chief of the armed forces in many countries the armed forces are used domestically to control the population how are we protected from that at least the president should be commander in chief of the army navy in the united states and of the militia of the several states and the militia is called into the actual service of the united states that's all the constitution has to say about that now we're very much opposed to standing armies you'll find that in the declaration of independence which is about technically a constitutional document so you could argue that notwithstanding this general power required of the president if the president were to misuse his power as commander in a way that violated other constitutional rights and freedoms that is an intermissible exercise of his power as commander in chief I'm certainly not hesitating yeah I think the only thing that I would add on to this from sort of historical examples are questions of whether the president could do this by himself or whether he would need buying from congress or something like this in terms of how the military is utilized or what a president we know for example that it's congress that has the authority to spend the religious orbits that's not quite the same thing as what you're talking about but I think it's corollary to this argument here so I think very much there are sort of somewhat open questions here but I actually think that again this of course all presupposes that congress it would be invested enough to be able to get involved in this but I would question a little bit how much the president could do this all on his own let me just add a footnote we've talked about the steel seizure case during the Korean war in that case president Truman invoked his power as commander in chief as a justification for basically the united states taking over the steel industry in order to get rid of the problem of strikes in the steel industry during war time justice black who was joined by the rest of the court as to results and you cannot use your powers commander chief except he said in the theater of war the problem with that is it made sense during the Korean war but today with the war on terrorism the theater of war is virtually everywhere but anyway that was a limitation that the court imposed on his ability to invoke his power commander chief in the domestic context so I would bring that case right up the flag I may be like a lot of other people and I wonder every day what our current president has done that's legal and maybe has done that's illegal I have no clue and I'm not sure we'll hear any of that eventually but if a president were to do something blatantly illegal wakes up one morning does whatever you know shy of murdering somebody who is the first whistleblower who watches the president's every move to make sure that he's not breaking law how about the ACLU how about members of congress it's also possible but it reacts in a way that's clearly and blatantly unconstitutional even his own justice department would take some sort of action but normally in our political life we thought for example during the second world war when Japanese Americans on the west comes we should off to internment camps the ACLU brings lawsuits saying that violates the constitutional rights of Japanese Americans if it was the court kicked the can down the road it avoided dealing with that in an honest way but at least that's an organization that often brings lawsuits aimed at protecting our civil rights and liberties against abuses of executive power unconstitutional so that's why our organization I'm sure there are others I would just add that our constitution is permissed on this notion that checks and balances and ambition is made to counteract ambition and one of the famous phrases from the federalist paper there's an assumption built in that it is in somebody's political self-interest to check somebody else in this case think about the candidates for the democratic nomination announced in recent days and they've announced by saying listen my primary purpose is to check this president this guy has gone too far in terms of some of the decisions and if you elect me I will reverse those decisions so the primary check I think on presidential power is elections and it's people going and voting and voting in people who are going to act in a way that you think is proper in terms of holding people accountable that's an important and undervalued tool that we have in this country yeah I'm just going to second that and I've heard somebody in the audience as well say voters or something like that I think that's right in Madison you know kind of called that the first the precaution and that it doesn't always work so we need auxiliary precautions even that's not working perfectly right now right because we had an election just a couple of months ago and you wouldn't know it by paying any attention to Mitch McConnell perhaps but I think that is it the simple answer to your question it's not going to be a satisfying one is that it totally depends right on what kind of action it is that we're talking about and the last thing I'll say on this is that with respect to the role of the judiciary that as well is sometimes a problem because one of the reasons why the judiciary either can't or won't rule on some of these questions is that they don't believe that anybody has the legal right sometimes to challenge some of these things and that is a whole other problem with the judiciary which leads us, leaves us with Congress and the court of public opinion so another quick note there are a couple provisions in the constitution called the emolument clauses for and domestic emolument clauses that prohibit the president from using his public office for personal gain that was challenged that's allegedly a violation of the constitution when he does that with respect to Trump towers and so on using those to primarily generate profit from foreign people from foreign governments who come that was challenged by a public interest group called CREW I can't remember exactly what it stands for there are some problems there they might not have standing it was also challenged by the attorney general and Maryland and Virginia or in DC I can't remember so state and that case is preceded so there are ways to challenge unconstitutional acts by the executive yes just a footnote on the first question which was about the president of the domestic law enforcement because I know it's making a lot of us increasingly nervous correct me if I'm wrong but in addition to the constitution there's also the policy combatant of statute which if I'm right about the content of it it says the president can only do that using armies with domestic law enforcement yes there's a state of emergency or an act of congress permitting them to do that or floating the idea of emergencies it says if he's trying to get a looser notion of when he can invoke a declaration of emergency so for those of us getting nervous about this it sounds like the president's setting the stage for the possibility of using armies with domestic law enforcement in a looser way than we would have imagined yes in fact suppose we're talking to a fifth or sixth grader who's studying the powers of government and how those things work and the student says to you how come Barack Obama didn't get to choose his supreme court justice how do you answer that in good faith why didn't Obama get to choose his supreme court justice how did that happen okay well the simple answer is because there's nothing in the constitution that requires the senate to act and so there is no constitutional mandate that a nomination be handled by the senate in any particular period of time and again that's the sort of thing that the judiciary would I would just not get involved in leave it up to the executive branch and the senate to fight it out themselves and if the student says that's not fair it's not fair yeah no I don't disagree with that but it is something that the U.S supreme court would rule is left up to the political branches to resolve and again as Matt kind of got back to and as I heard a voice in the audience mention if you really don't like it then take it out of the golden booth when the sixth grader is open up to vote not a satisfying answer perhaps but it's the answer actually can I just make one more comment about this and then because I know that there are other hands raised one thing that I talk about regularly is the importance of the legitimacy of the judiciary especially as a branch with little formal power of its own based on the political science research in this area I've been telling students for years that nobody, no politician would mess with the supreme court the way that we've seen them do historically because the legitimacy of the court is so high right now that that is a political loser obviously I was wrong about that that not only did republicans get away with it but they were rewarded for it and I don't know where we go with that I don't think it's good not even in terms of just that one appointment and of itself, I don't know what that means for the place of the supreme court and getting kicked around by the other branches but my sense is that it's probably not good and is that I just want to follow up is that also the case with respect to these hearings on appointees and the lack of information that they're not really forthcoming and the way in which we would hope so we have some idea that senators have some idea of what these justices would I think what I would say about that is that first of all political scientists might push back on that point a little bit and say that there actually is more information that comes out in these than you might think I don't want to stand behind that point too much because I've listened to them in recent years too and they're usually pretty dull affairs where the nominees try really really hard not to say anything controversial my answer might not be what you expect but it's that I think that kind of points to how high the stakes are with these now that they're generally perceived as opportunities to lose your appointment but so your strategy is to be as bland and non-controversial as possible and say things like I'm just an umpire calling balls and strikes I'm quoting Chief Justice John Roberts here and that wins the day so that's back to Matt's point that you have to be non-ideological in that context I mean the ideologies are so gridlocked so I want to get to the other questions yes in the corner there's been some discussion about the authority of the president to act militarily to engage militarily when Congress hasn't spoken I'm recalling I think correctly that when the president of Syria used chemical weapons at one point and there was a lot of call and question about whether Barack Obama should intervene militarily or should commence an escalation of war in Syria and he explicitly deferred to Congress I think he did it for political reasons but it's an interesting example of and maybe an unusual example of one of the institutional actors here purposefully deferring and not exerting not claiming the power and I just invite comment on that you correctly acknowledged that he did so partly for other aspects for instance and sort of leading from behind with overthrowing Gaddafi and Libya he might have pushed the envelope a little bit and again the whole war powers I think we sort of talked about this before is an area where potentially presidents have some greater discretion to take action in part because there's a willingness to defer to them as the only elected representative who sort of has a national constituency so they're the closest we have to national sovereign there's that part of that power resides on they are sort of the quasi monarch here and so we tend to give them a little more deference but a part of the problem too is I think Peter alluded is the conduct of war today in an era of war on terror makes that war power act so much more difficult to adjudicate and Congress has just been very reluctant when the president says there's a national interest at stake here militarily Congress has been very reluctant or unable to sort of coordinate and act in ways that tell us the president will slow down here we want to debate this because in any of these issues the president foreign policy decisions could have been Congress could have intervened here but they didn't it's a combination I think the willingness of presidents to push in this era this modern era sort of the war on terror post 9-11 and Congress's reluctance to sort of intercede on that politically because they're worried about the cost well I mean Congress hasn't issued a declaration of war so how many wars have we had I mean Vietnam, Syria, Korea I mean Congress has just updated its role maybe I'm wrong but that's my understanding well Congress can also do things like pass the authorization for use of military force although even that has you know just been relied on so much for so long for actions that had nothing to do with 9-11 so I think we raise a good point first of all I agree completely with the way that you characterize Obama's motivation with respect to Syria I think that was I agree with you an example of trying to throw some of the pressure to Congress of like I'm not taking the heat for this all by myself and that might sound counterintuitive but I would actually argue that that fits a little bit in maybe kind of a reverse way Madison's argument that Matt brought up a while ago which is that he envisioned these actors would be self-interested and sometimes it is in your self-interest to shove some of the heat off on to somebody else and I think that was an example of the Syria thing and again since I always have to go back to the judiciary here because that's what I do I think there are a lot of examples in American history that can point to one of the reasons why the judiciary is more powerful than it used to be is that it's really appealing sometimes for political actors to shove hot potato questions on to the judiciary let's let them do it and let them take the heat and we can kind of move on to the stuff that will pull our coalition together as opposed to risk ripping our coalition apart it sounds like the backdrop for a lot of this discussion has to do with polarization and political will as Matt talked about and I wonder how much of that is grounded in voter participation and whether these issues that we're dealing with has to do with especially since 2000 when we've been through seven of the eight iterations of government whether we're really looking at the result of low voter participation or if we look back in history were these issues there when voter participation was fought great questions wonderful questions so there's an ongoing debate about the level of voter participation and when we talk about voter participation it's not only the number of people who participate but within that number who participate so we know a lot about who votes and who doesn't vote that people voting habits tend or propensity to vote goes up the higher educated they are and the wealthier they are and so socioeconomic status matters and so you might ask is that skewing the decisions they're making in certain ways then you want to know also overall turnout because it raises questions of legitimacy if not enough people are voting then arguably our elected representatives aren't really representing all of us and when we talk about turnout too we have to remember one of the developments in recent years has been we've lowered the age to voting from 21 to 18 prior to that time we expanded to vote for women and prior to that time of course civil rights legislation all of those sort of open the pool of who participates but not everybody participates equally based on that widening of the potential pool here so what I would say is beyond voting what we have is the problem with elections isn't so much who votes it's the choices that are presented to them and by this I mean we are out right now in the process of electing the president in 2020 you don't know that because you're not even going to bother voting in the Vermont primary until when is the Vermont part of March 2020 decisions are being made now who's making them? donors, party elites issue activists they're all working behind the scenes to determine which candidates are viable and which aren't we call this the invisible primary what does this mean? it means by the time that important choice is made the voters have to choose between you know in the nominating process maybe six to eight candidates and it's not clear that those candidates are really who they would have chosen if they had a choice to start of but it's the people who sort of survive this invisible primary sort of yes there is a question about political participation and whether turnout which is roughly 58 to 60% of eligible voters now is that good? is that not good internationally it's not great and how do we increase that and we can lower structural barriers and all that but I would say the bigger problem we have here is the choices that we're presenting our voters the elites in both parties are not representative of the views of most Americans they tend to represent the views of people who are and I'm not saying these views are wrong but they are views that tend to represent the interests of a small more ideologically extreme portion of the party and when you Joe and Jane Sixpack go to the voting booth and they have to choose between you know and I'm exaggerating slightly you know goose stepping you know gun-toting, bottle-fumping abortion hanging person on the right and some tree-hugging, secular humanist you know a lot of these sifting person on the left that's all the choice they have they might want somebody in the middle but that's not there for them in the political system I worry a little less about issues of participation although they're important but I worry a lot more about the choices that are being foisted on the public I'd like to go right back to voter participation because I'm absolutely absolutely told that voting takes place during a work day and when you say that higher educated people tend to vote is because they can vote how are you going to get off from your job to stay in line for four hours in a place where they're locking up voting machines where you have no access to actually use that right that you are granted so I mean I think that there is a lot of that system is completely broken and needs to be fixed yeah I agree my concern though is that in many states it's going in the wrong direction that this boogie man to voter fraud is being used as an opportunity to make it even more difficult for people to vote and lest you think this is only something that's happening in the deep south New Hampshire has done this made it more difficult for college students from outside the state of New Hampshire to vote we don't tend to do this here in Vermont but I agree with you that that is a big concern and it's demoralizing to see in some parts of the country that it's going in the wrong direction on that point I mean you think of Maryland as a liberal democratic state and there's your many positions bad it's true I'd like to go back to Matt's recent comments the choices presented to the electorate and we've seen some attempts to change the way those choices are presented recently the so-called jungle primary in California where the candidates are the top two vote-getters in the primary regardless of what party they come from and then Maine has recently adopted for some election ranked choice voting or instant runoff voting could you comment on the potential for innovations like that to make the choices more appealing to voters to increase the voter participation of the people in the election yes so the California version of the jungle primary it's I think he explained very well which is the idea that in a primary everybody's grouped together you can run under a particular party label but it's not necessarily listed there and then the top two vote-getters regardless of party go into the general election so you may have a general election in California you're voting between two Democrats and the idea here was instead of having an extremist from the right and the left the idea is you might have a moderate person as an extremist and it's very early in this experiment one of the problems we're finding is a lot of voters don't really haven't figured it out yet they're not quite sure what they're doing ranked choice voting you talked about in Maine again in which you sort of have a two-step process in which there's an initial vote and then you can based on how you rank those voters the votes are recalibrated and the idea is to develop a consensus candidate those are all important structural changes and certainly I think getting back to the earlier point about the same-day voting in Vermont we have tried to remove it a lot of these barriers my wife was a town clerk and I can't speak for her she's in the back of the room but she'll tell you there are some ramifications if you're a town clerk the same-day voting but she's learned to adjust to this as most town clerks do there's always trade-offs so yeah, there are ways we know by looking at other countries one of the things that other countries do much better than we do is their political parties are much better mobilizing agents because the parties tend to be class-based so you have a labor party that will mobilize people with lower socioeconomic status we don't really have that here but yeah, let's have a holiday three-day voting, let's have weekend voting all these things we think can bring up participation in education certainly talk with your sixth grader and tell them about voting I would point out some of the things that we thought were going to help voting have proved counterproductive interesting enough early voting a lot of states are moving to early voting it turns out that decreases participation and we never really thought that would've and the reason is voting is a social act a lot of you vote because you see your neighbors voting or you start talking about it because election day is arriving but if it turns out 30% of your neighbors have already voted you're not getting that same buzz and so a political science has actually studied this and said geez, we screwed this one up early voting is decreasing participation who would have thought that so you gotta be really careful about this but yeah, I think both those points are important points I'm really concerned about that whole issue of like which candidates are presented doesn't matter how well you improve voting participation if they only have wrong choices and in particular I'm very interested in the right choice of voting which seems like it can be helpful either at the local level or at the state level or letting your U.S. Senator or Representative but it can't work with your electoral college or you could say you could have some moderate person and participate in the caucuses but in Iowa and see if you can get like a normal human being as a candidate but they have to choose which of the two parties and if they don't have a full vote in the party they're an independent person or if they're just not in the leader of the party and they're not going to get support and get very far I don't see how we're going to get past that with the electoral college well I'm not sure that we are but we're on and a number of other states not a sufficient number have adopted an approach called national popular vote and basically the way that works is that whoever wins the national popular vote, your state agrees to support is that the way it works? that's only a two party case I agree still, you know, I'm sitting here feeling more and more depressed the one thing we can conclude safely is that the system is not working the way the framers imagine it they had this sort of nice approach congress will adopt laws the president will have energy and direction and will carry the country forward by complying with those laws to describe you've got paralysis in congress and I'm sitting here thinking what does he want to do? how is he going to get us out of this? does he want the president to have more power? because if we give the president more power you don't have as much paralysis, right? but it seems to me as we've talked tonight we move interestingly back to focusing on the primary and the system that if we can only somehow correct the primary system we might be able to to begin to elect people how in congress what was out of the problem? I don't know if that's what the suggestion is for me to go to that university well, I think just quickly follow up with Peter's point and then start it over I think that's exactly right we used to have this system of smoke filled rooms in which party elites would basically choose who they want to run or run one of the big trends in American politics has been changing norms of legitimacy I don't think most of us wouldn't like that anymore if somebody in smoke filled rooms chose our candidates for us but you know what? when they made that choice they said who's going to win the election and who's the most you know, electable candidate now a lot of purists who are involved in politics are more concerned about who's the person who's going to toe my ideological line and God help them if they try to compromise with the other party because I'm going to run somebody who's more pure than they are and you know the difficult and Peter and getting rid of primaries and so on as it means restricting participation none of us really want to do that but the problem is when you open up the gates to allow participation gets back to your point not everybody participates equally that's the activists who take advantage of these particularly very early in the process and so they're winnowing the field well you and I aren't even thinking about 2020 because you know we've got more important things to do so I'm going to be so I'm going to be a council of despair you know and these are hard questions and part of it I think and I defer to both of you is we're trading off different values so we might make institutional reforms that increase participation on the assumption that everyone's going to participate equally but then they don't so you know that's a clash with the idea of decision making versus widespread popular participation which one do you value the most we depend on the political process to make these choices for us you know we can debate on how well they're choosing among these competing values but that's a lot of I think what's at stake here is a lot of competing values so you have a couple did you have one Michael? you folks make a living barely studying strange things I wish I could but I don't have the memory but I do I do wonder if there are some countries where the women are in control and how was that fizzled out or did it fizzle out or did it boom I from my experience I'm 84 years old I know of many many families the gentleman is much stronger physically but the woman runs a place one way or another you may have an in Spain for example where you vote for parties if you get out of a hundred candidates you vote for Jen they've got a provision that says out of every four candidates being presented by a party two of them have to be women so it's blatant gender based discrimination but it does the work I don't know that we would accept that approach under the 14th at least that's one approach you can have you can say would I have a mixture of people representing us in the government so I can't speak with a lot of authority on this because I study American politics but what I can say from speaking to my colleagues who study comparative politics is that actually and I think this sort of fits something that Matt was saying a little while ago is that the political systems where elites have more control sometimes result in more females in positions of authority too and to give you an analogous example in the American political system it's kind of a narrow example but in the states that elect their judges for example they tend to have less diversity on their bench than the states where judicial appointments are controlled more by elites so I think that's another kind of tension between opening things up for more democratic, small D democratic input versus a drive for more diversity perhaps just one thing in the history of the United States I don't ever remember of women having duels so the point that I had is a great point so we've done a lot of study of gender impact on the legislative body at the national level Congress is about 24% women now in Congress it's incrementally been increasing but it's nowhere near with descriptive representation yet we know a couple of things in these studies and by the way don't start Hillary Clinton because the presidency is a whole other thing so I'm only talking about Congress we know this when women run they do as well as men electorally once you control for the issues when they are elected you push a different set of issues than men do it's a significant having women in the legislative assembly makes a huge difference in terms of the types of issues that are debated generally speaking women we know the source of the gender gap too in terms of voting it's not necessarily a quote-unquote women's issues it's concerned for the most vulnerable in society women are just more oriented and we're not going to go beyond saying what we know about agenda setting we're more oriented towards policies that protect the more vulnerable people in society more so than men are question is how do you improve if we think these are positive developments how do you improve women's representation when the biggest problems we have women are asked they're not asked to run we've done surveys of them and that's the biggest thing that's preventing them from running men are just built up in the volunteer they all run that naturally ask them listen your next thin line jump to the frontier and run now that's changing but very glacially I think nearly as quickly as most of us we are we are at the end you're close there's one other way to get women and minorities to run and that's to provide for public funding on campaigns that is shown to be actually effective in increasing representation in political campaigns of women and minority candidates thank you very much all of you