Immigration policy has long been one of the most contentious and ultimately transformative issues on the American public agenda, evoking intense political struggles over how to regulate the flow of newcomers. Rival interests and ideals lie at the heart of these profound political conflicts. For more than two centuries, Americans have argued about the impact of new immigrants on jobs and economic growth, demography, culture, social welfare, the distribution of political power, foreign relations, and national security.
The United States may be a nation built upon immigration, but it has long been ambivalent about new arrivals. From Benjamin Franklin’s eighteenth-century fears that Pennsylvania Germans would never assimilate to Samuel Huntington’s more recent warnings that a growing Latino population imperils cultural harmony, many Americans have celebrated their sojourner past while dreading the immigrant present and future. For others, especially those in the labor movement, fresh waves of immigration have been perceived as anathema to workplace standards and economic security. By contrast, cosmopolitans such as Jane Addams and John F. Kennedy have championed broad immigrant admissions and rights as consistent with the American Creed, while capitalists like Andrew Carnegie have praised immigration as “a golden stream” that fortifies U.S. prosperity. In short, the choices raised by immigration policy have spurred vibrant debate since the founding and have served as a bellwether for larger political conflicts over changing economic opportunities, the status of ethnic, religious, and racial minorities, and the nation’s evolving role in international diplomacy and warfare.
The polarizing politics of immigration reform, both past and present, has made policy making arduous but not impossible. Indeed, it has produced strange political bedfellows over time and yielded marked shifts from one period to the next between national policies that have significantly stimulated or discouraged immigration. The federal government only gradually and reluctantly took control of regulating immigrant admissions over the course of the nineteenth century. Since then, American immigration policy has assumed both restrictive and expansive forms. Whereas the creation of national origins quotas and an Asiatic Barred Zone in the 1920s effectively closed the gates, immigration reforms since 1965 helped trigger the nation’s fourth major wave of migration, predominantly originating in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. Few policy areas have left a more profound mark on the development and present character of American social, economic, political, and cultural life. Even when immigration reform has had unintended results or when the best-laid plans of lawmakers have been defied by migratory behavior—such as dramatic increases in both unauthorized immigration and undocumented populations living in the United States—the policy outcomes have reshaped the nation.
At the time of the founding, due to early waves of immigration and the importation of slaves, the United States was already a remarkably diverse country in terms of religion, race, and ethnicity. Less than half of the new republic’s white population could be described as English when the Revolution began. Anglo-Americans remained the dominant group in the former English colonies, but British newcomers increasingly came from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Moreover, one-third of the country’s white inhabitants claimed German, Swedish, French, Swiss, or Dutch origins. Southern importation of African slaves was the principal engine of racial diversity in the early American republic. Finally, the United States was more religiously diverse than any country in Europe. Although immigration slowed to a trickle during the era of the American Revolution (no more than a few thousand per year), some national leaders remained wary of future inflows. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), Thomas Jefferson criticized the new nation’s member states for their “present desire to produce rapid population by as great importations of foreigners as possible.” Most newcomers, he feared, would prove incapable of shedding their loyalties to the “absolute monarchy” of the Old World, or prone to material and anarchical temptations of the new one. The French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic warfare in Europe delayed robust immigration to the United States until well after the 1820s. Nevertheless, new state governments wasted little time in establishing their own immigration and naturalization policies soon after the nation’s founding. Most of these policies were designed to entice new European settlers and to extend broad membership rights to white male newcomers.
With the ratification of the Constitution, the young nation embraced a laissez-faire federal policy toward European immigration and authorized Congress “to establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization.” During Philadelphia deliberations in 1787, James Madison observed that those states which most encouraged European immigration were the strongest in population, agriculture, and the arts, and he warned against restrictions on immigrant rights that might “give a tincture of illiberality” to the new republic. The first Congress in 1790 enacted a naturalization law that granted citizenship to “free white persons” who lived in the United States for as little as two years.
During the 1790s, support for immigration was eroded by the Anglo-French conflict and partisan polarization at home. For the dominant Federalists, new French and Irish immigrants were untrustworthy because of their celebration of French revolutionary ideals and their support for the Democratic-Republican opposition. Federalist majorities in Congress passed a new naturalization law in 1795 that increased the residency requirement for citizenship to five years. Responding to security jitters in 1798 associated with the French conflict, Federalist lawmakers enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts. The legislation made immigrants eligible for citizenship only after 14 years of residency, and all aliens were required to register with federal officials. The Alien Act empowered the president to arrest and deport any alien “whom he shall judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” The Alien Enemies Act, passed the same year, authorized the president to confine or remove male enemy aliens age 14 years or older during times of war. The Alien and Sedition Acts proved to be short-lived, as the victory of Jeffersonian Republicans in 1800 led to a repeal of alien registration requirements and the restoration of a five-year residency requirement for naturalization. With future elections and economic development in mind, Jefferson proclaimed that the United States represented a New Canaan where “those whom the misrule of Europe may compel to seek happiness in other climes” would “be received as brothers.”
From the 1820s until the start of the Civil War, roughly 5 million European immigrants came to the United States. During the 1820s, immigration accounted for only 4 percent of the steady increase in American population; by the 1850s, immigration accounted for nearly one-third of U.S. population growth. The national government remained all but silent on European immigration during this period. Federal law required that new arrivals be counted after 1819 to maintain uniform statistics, and it mandated minimum living standards for vessels carrying immigrant passengers to the country. However, the task of regulating immigration continued to fall to state and local governments. In practice, the modest structures governing immigrant traffic in antebellum America were the creation and responsibility of a few states with large ports, such as New York (where most immigrants landed), Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. State immigration laws authorized exclusion of immigrants with criminal records, contagious illnesses, or other undesirable qualities, but few were turned away. Coastal states charged ship masters small head taxes on their immigrant passengers, a practice affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1837. The 1848 Passenger Cases reversed this holding, asserting that state head taxes violated federal prerogatives, but states made minor adjustments and maintained primacy in this area.
The dramatic expansion of U.S. territory with the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican-American War created a strong demand for new immigrants to settle a large frontier. Territorial governments actively recruited European newcomers, hiring agents to recruit immigrants overseas or as they landed in port cities. The rise of an industrial economy also required an expanded labor force that European immigration helped realize. Grassroots nativism accompanied the unprecedented immigration of the antebellum decades, with Irish Catholic newcomers the most frequent targets of xenophobic hostility. Whereas Germans, who dominated immigration in these years. exemplified religious, class, and ideological diversity, the Irish were almost invariably poor and Roman Catholic. Anglo-American angst over the Irish Catholic influx, which soared during the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, was exacerbated by competition for jobs and housing in northeastern cities, struggles over public and parochial education, and the marriage of powerful urban party machines and Irish voters. Anti-Catholic books, newspapers, and magazines flourished in the antebellum period, offering lurid accounts of sinister Roman Catholic crimes and plots that fed Protestant antipathy. Sometimes the dark tales promulgated by this anti-Catholic literature spurred mob violence, from the 1834 burning of the Ursuline convent near Boston to the 1844 Bible Riots in Philadelphia that led to 20 deaths and the destruction of more than 100 Catholic churches, schools, and homes. The ranks of secret anti-Catholic associations swelled in seaboard cities. The nativist leader Samuel Morse, a newspaper editor and future inventor of the telegraph, organized an anti-immigrant party and ran for New York City mayor in 1836. He also fed anti-Catholic venom through popular and incendiary writings such as Foreign Conspiracy (1841), warning readers that “the evil of immigration brings to these shores illiterate Roman Catholics, the obedient instruments of their more knowing priestly leaders.”
Because of the nation’s insatiable appetite for immigrant labor and the clout of Irish voters, political nativists enjoyed little success until the 1850s. In 1849 secret nativist societies formed the Order of the Star Spangled Banner to furtively organize electoral support for its anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant agenda in cities around the country. The movement’s rank and file included Anglo-American workers, artisans, and small entrepreneurs. Their secrecy led Horace Greeley to mock their members in New York Tribune as “know-nothings”—a label soon applied to political nativists who sought to restrict immigration and Catholic influence. The Know-Nothing movement formed a new American Party in the 1850s devoted to strict limits on immigrant admissions, 21-year waiting periods for citizenship, and restricting voting rights and officeholding to the native-born.
The Know-Nothings benefited enormously from a political vacuum created by the gradual demise of the Whig Party and balkanization of the Democrats. During the 1854 and 1855 elections, the American Party elected seven Know-Nothing governors, controlled eight state legislatures, and established a strong presence in Congress. In 1856, the party nominated Millard Fillmore for president, and he won 22 percent of the popular vote. The movement’s meteoric rise transcended the ballot box. Know-Nothing candy, tea, and other merchandise were successfully marketed, while buses, stagecoaches and clipper ships soon bore the popular name. The decline of the American Party was as swift and dramatic as its ascent. The new Republican Party siphoned away nativist voters more devoted to excluding slavery from the territories than the Know-Nothings’ “war to the hilt on Romanism.” By 1860 the movement had collapsed. Ironically, the same slavery controversy that helped elevate anti-Catholic xenophobia in antebellum America was the driving force behind its rapid demise.
To the chagrin of nativists, European immigration flourished in the last half of the nineteenth century. Fueled by federal recruitment efforts in Europe, the Homestead Act, and industrialization, inflows from Europe reached record levels in the post–Civil War decades. Immigration soared to 2.3 million in the 1860s, 2.8 million in the 1870s, 5.2 million in the 1880s, 3.6 million in the 1890s, and 8.8 million in the first decade of the twentieth century. The vast majority of new arrivals landed in New York, where they were channeled through a central immigration depot, Manhattan’s Castle Garden. The nationalization of U.S. immigration policy began in 1875, when the Supreme Court nullified state efforts to regulate alien inflows as unconstitutional encroachments on exclusive congressional power. The Immigration Act of 1882 essentially legitimized state policies governing immigration that had been struck down by the Court. It excluded “any convict, lunatic, idiot” or anyone deemed likely to become a public charge, while assessing head taxes on each entrant to fund inspections and welfare provision for needy arrivals. In 1885 the Knights of Labor persuaded Democratic majorities in Congress to enact a ban on the importation of foreign contract labor. Legislation in 1891 created a new federal bureaucracy in the Treasury Department to supervise the screening of immigrants, with a corps of federal immigration inspectors stationed at the nation’s major ports of entry. Within the year, Castle Garden was replaced by a new federal facility in New York harbor, Ellis Island. Screening nearly three-quarters of new arrivals, Ellis Island became the largest and busiest inspection station for years to come.
Compared to its European counterparts, Chinese immigration of the late nineteenth century was miniscule (4 percent of all immigration at its zenith), but it inspired one of the most brutal and successful nativist movements in U.S. history. Official and popular racism made Chinese newcomers especially vulnerable; their lack of numbers, political power, or legal protections gave them none of the weapons that enabled Irish Catholics to counterattack nativists. Chinese workers were first recruited to California from the 1850s through the 1870s as cheap contract labor for mining, railroad construction, manufacturing, and farming. They inspired hostility among white workers for allegedly lowering wages and working conditions, while newspapers and magazines portrayed the Chinese as a race of godless opium addicts, prostitutes, and gamblers. Labor leaders in San Francisco organized large anti-Chinese clubs in every ward of the city during the 1860s, and comparable associations followed in cities and towns throughout the state. California politicians also learned that anti-Chinese speeches and policies translated into votes. The state’s first Republican governor in 1862, Leland Stanford, promised “to protect free white labor” from the “degraded” Chinese while, at the same time, his own farming and railroad enterprises employed them.
Economic distress inflamed the anti-Chinese movement in the 1870s, as the closing of unproductive mines, the completion of the transcontinental railroad, and a flood of new settlers to the Pacific Coast led to rampant unemployment. San Francisco union leaders again spearheaded Sinophobic organizational efforts, initiating a grassroots network of Chinese Exclusion Leagues that spread across California and the Far West to elect sympathetic candidates. From 1871 onward, California politicians raced to claim credit for a steady stream of anti-Chinese reforms that included state-level barriers to Chinese entry, segregation laws, and special taxes on Chinese businesses. One of the anti-Chinese movement’s most effective firebrands was Denis Kearney, an Irish immigrant who blamed Chinese immigrants for his personal failure at mining. His demagogic campaign, which began with race-baiting speeches in the San Francisco sandlots, drew white laborers into a new Workingmen’s Party of California, dedicated to the proposition that “the Chinese must go!” Kearney spurred a state constitutional convention in 1878 targeting the “Chinese menace,” as well as an 1879 state referendum that endorsed Chinese exclusion by a 150,000-to-900 vote. When the Supreme Court struck down state-level efforts to restrict Chinese immigration, the Sinophobic movement pressed Congress to enact sweeping exclusions.
Fierce party competition in presidential elections of the post-Reconstruction era transformed the anti-Chinese movement into a national political juggernaut. As the New York Times queried in 1880, “Which great political party is foolish enough to risk losing the votes of the Pacific States by undertaking to do justice to the Chinese?”—neither, as it turned out. Large bipartisan majorities in Congress suspended Chinese admissions for ten years with passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Some of the worst anti-Chinese riots erupted in subsequent years, as Sinophobes sought to purge Chinese communities altogether across the Far West. Forced expulsions were initiated almost wherever Chinese numbered in the hundreds in cities and towns of the Pacific Northwest and Mountain States. During the 1885 Rock Springs, Wyoming, massacre, 28 Chinese were murdered and every Chinese-owned building except one was destroyed. In Tacoma and Seattle during 1885 and 1886, Chinese residents were given “deportation” deadlines. They suffered looting, arson, and violent riots until few remained. In subsequent election years, national Democrats and Republicans curried favor with the Sinophobic movement by enacting increasingly draconian restrictions on the “Chinese race.” The 1888 Scott Act, for instance, denied readmission of Chinese who left U.S. territory; 20,000 were not allowed to return under the law and many were separated from their families. The Sinophobic fervor did not subside until the early 1900s, when a significantly reduced Chinese population was concentrated in a few self-sufficient Chinatowns.
As western nativists put their final touches on Chinese exclusion, a new anti-Catholic movement emerged in the nation’s heartland. The American Protective Association (APA) was founded in Clinton, Iowa, in 1887 by Henry Bowers, an attorney aggrieved by a friend’s mayoral defeat and the decline of public schools, both of which he attributed to malevolent Catholic influence. An ardent Mason, Bowers made the APA into a secret fraternal order with an anti-Catholic political agenda that drew heavily upon the rituals, organization, and membership of Masonic lodges. The APA spread in the early 1890s to larger midwestern and Rocky Mountain communities where Catholics were gaining political and social clout; its support came primarily from Protestant businessmen, disaffected union workers, and those competing with cheap Irish labor.
In 1893 the ranks of APA faithful surged to more than a half million. Its growth owed much to new leadership by William “Whiskey Bill” Traynor, a former saloon owner with considerable experience promoting anti-Catholic causes and publishing nativist newspapers. During the depression of 1893, he and his APA lieutenants roused crowds by blaming the economic crisis on Irish Catholic immigrants who allegedly stole jobs, started a run on the banks, and encouraged labor militancy.
Rather than form a third party, APA organizers established local and state “advisory boards” to endorse candidates, almost invariably Republican, who demonstrated strong anti-Catholic credentials. In 1893 and 1894, APA voters were credited with electing anti-Catholic Republicans in municipal, school board, and congressional elections in midwestern and Rocky Mountain States. Yet the importance of immigrant labor and votes led many national Republican leaders to challenge the APA’s nativist agenda. In 1896 William McKinley’s presidential campaign actively courted immigrant and Roman Catholic voters while purging the APA from Republican ranks. Cut loose from its partisan moorings, the APA quickly faded from the political landscape.
As the APA crusade dissipated, a new anti-immigrant movement led by the upper-class Immigration Restriction League (IRL), the American Federation of Labor, and patriotic societies distanced itself from anti-Catholic nativism. Embracing the scientific racism of Social Darwinism and the eugenics movement, these reformers argued that southern and eastern Europeans arriving in record numbers from countries like Italy, Greece, Russia, Hungary, and Poland were biologically inferior to immigrants from Western and Northern Europe. Their chief goal was a literacy test for admission, based on the presumption that most immigrants lacking Anglo-Saxon lineage were unable to read. They enjoyed a prominent champion in Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who warned that “new” European immigration posed “nothing less than the possibility of a great and perilous change in the fabric of our race.” Progressive Era nativists also spurned party politics in favor of mass publicity campaigns, biased research, and full-time Washington lobbying. Their efforts paid dividends when the 1911 Dillingham Commission, led by IRL allies, including Lodge, produced 42 volumes of findings that purportedly vindicated nativist claims about southern and eastern Europeans. Despite these inroads, a counter-mobilization of immigration defenders led by employer and ethnic groups yielded policy stalemate. President Woodrow Wilson denounced the nativist agenda as inconsistent with “the humane ardors of our republic.”
The onset of World War I broke the logjam. Immigration restrictionists seized upon wartime anxieties to win passage of an immigration literacy test in 1917, arguing that southern and eastern Europeans were inherently disloyal and dangerous. While the IRL and its allies were closing the gates, an Americanization movement attacked any hint of divided loyalties among the foreign-born already in the country. Theodore Roosevelt led the charge for “100% Americanism,” denouncing “hyphenated” Americans as guilty of no less then “moral treason.” Patriotic conformity was pursued by a government-sponsored network of local defense and patriotic associations, including 250,000 badge-wearing volunteers of the American Protective League (APL). German Americans, celebrated for decades as the model ethnic group, endured the harshest treatment. They were targets of vandalism, mob violence, surveillance, and harassment by APL watchdogs; job discrimination; and arrest for unpatriotic speech. By 1918 public burnings of German books were common, dozens of German American newspapers and organizations were forced to dissolve, and several states prohibited speaking German or playing German-composed music in public.
After the war, the immigration restriction movement mobilized for new reforms when the literacy test failed to curb southern and eastern European inflows. As European immigration soared to 800,000 in 1920, a sharp leap from the meager numbers of the war years, a State Department report warned that the country faced an inundation of “filthy” and “unassimilable” Jews, displaced by persecution in eastern and central Europe. At the same time, the House Immigration Committee employed its own “expert eugenics agent,” Harry Laughlin, to illuminate racial differences among immigrants. “We in this country have been so imbued with the idea of democracy, or the equality of all men,” Laughlin testified, “that we have left out of consideration the matter of blood or natural inborn hereditary mental and moral differences. No man who breeds pedigreed plants and animals can afford to neglect this thing.” During the first “Red scare,” immigration restrictionists pressed for “emergency” legislation to fend off a foreign influx that would compromise national security. The Quota Act of 1921 established annual limits of 3 percent of each nationality living in the United States at the time of the 1910 census. These quotas were applied to immigration from all countries except those of the Western Hemisphere. The free flow of Western Hemisphere immigration was a concession that lawmakers made to southwestern growers who lobbied vigorously to retain access to cheap Mexican farm labor. Southern and eastern European inflows were the chief target of the new law, restricted by quotas to less than one-fourth of annual admissions before World War I.
The Immigration Act of 1924 marked the crowning achievement of the immigration restriction movement. It created a 165,000 ceiling on annual immigrant admissions, refined national origins quotas to reserve 84 percent of annual visas for northern and western Europeans, and reaffirmed an Asiatic Barred Zone that excluded virtually all Asian immigrants and most other nonwhites. “To the national dishonor of the ‘assisted’ immigration of slave trade days,” Jane Addams sadly noted, “we are adding another chapter.” But immigration restrictionists exalted as southern and eastern European immigration slowed to a trickle. “The United States is our land,” Congressman Albert Johnson proclaimed. “The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended.” Legislation in 1928 made the national origins quota system fully operative, but it also continued to allow unfettered Western Hemisphere migration as a bow to powerful southern and western lawmakers and economic interests. The result was a bifurcated system imposing draconian restrictions on European and Asian immigration while remaining open and flexible toward labor inflows from Mexico and other Western Hemisphere countries.
Mexican immigration increased substantially during the 1920s, but neither legal nor illegal Mexican inflows prompted great concern among national policy makers. Efforts by the American Federation of Labor to impose 1,500 annual quotas on Mexican immigration went nowhere because of resistance from southwestern growers and their supporters in Congress. The onset of the Great Depression changed public perceptions of Mexican labor migration considerably, leading to a mass deportation campaign that reinforced notions of Latino workers as a “returnable” labor force. At the same time, U.S. consular offices denied visas to those deemed “likely to become a public charge,” with the effect that many quota slots went unfilled. During the 1930s, immigration reached the lowest levels in a century and the total number of people leaving the country exceeded those entering for the first time in its history. From the rise of the Nazi regime until the end of World War II, powerful members of Congress and State Department officials blocked efforts to grant refuge to European Jews and others fleeing fascist regimes. In the early 1940s, by contrast, agribusinesses and other employer groups won White House support for a new Mexican temporary worker program, the Bracero Program, to address wartime labor shortages. This guest worker program would bring 4.2 million temporary Mexican laborers to the United States before it was terminated at the urging of organized labor in 1963.
During the 1940s and 1950s, pro-immigration reformers attempted to chip away at the national origins quota system. Eager to strengthen a wartime alliance with China, Congress repealed Chinese exclusion statutes in favor of a token annual quota. Symbolic quotas were extended to other Asian nations a few years later. Lawmakers also enacted the War Brides Act in 1946 that waived quota limits for the alien wives and children of U.S. servicemen. The cold war imperatives of global leadership and anticommunism led to other departures from the quota restrictions. President Harry Truman took unilateral action in 1945 to give 40,000 people from various European countries displaced by the war preferential consideration for visas. At Truman’s urging, Congress later passed the Displaced Persons acts of 1948 and 1950 to permit European refugees from countries with severe visa limits to be included in future quotas.
Despite these modest breaks in the restrictionist wall, cold war anxieties fueled passage of the Internal Security Act of 1950, which authorized the exclusion or deportation of aliens who had ever been Communists or members of any group deemed to be a “front” organization. In a nation that had fallen under the spell of McCarthyism, immigration restriction continued to enjoy a deep reservoir of both popular and congressional support. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 retained national origins quotas as the cornerstone of U.S. immigration policy and expanded the government’s alien surveillance and deportation powers. Receiving solid backing from southern and western members of Congress, it is little wonder that the 1952 law also contained a “Texas proviso” that exempted employers of undocumented aliens from any form of legal sanction. A year later, the Eisenhower administration persuaded lawmakers to open the door temporarily for 200,000 European refugees. In 1956 the White House used emergency powers to admit refugees from the failed Hungarian Revolution. During the same period, the federal government cracked down on illegal immigration. Supported by local police and federal troops, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) launched “Operation Wetback” in 1954 to quiet public concerns about a growing population of undocumented aliens. Dragnet raids led to the capture and summary expulsion of more than a million Mexican noncitizens.
The postwar decades witnessed the rise of a new movement for immigration reform that included a broad array of ethnic, human rights, religious, business, and even labor groups like the Congress of Industrial Organizations. During the early 1960s these reformers found champions in Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In 1964 Johnson called on Congress to “lift by legislation the bars of discrimination against those who seek entry into our country.” A product of the Great Society, the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 dismantled the national origins quota system in favor of a new preference system that gave primacy to reuniting families while reserving a limited number of visas for skilled workers and refugees. In its aftermath, an unexpected wave of Asian, Latin American, and Caribbean immigrants came to the United States, with European immigration falling by the early 1970s to only 10 percent of all legal admissions. The 1965 law also placed a 120,000 annual ceiling on Western Hemisphere visas that, along with the 1963 termination of the Bracero Program, spurred illegal Mexican inflows.
The issue of illegal immigration inspired more media attention, public concern, and remedial proposals by policy makers than did any other migratory issue of the 1970s. At the heart of early efforts to control porous borders was a proposal by organized labor and congressional Democrats like Peter Rodino to penalize employers who knowingly hired undocumented aliens. Employer sanctions bills met staunch resistance, however, from southwestern growers and various business groups opposed to new regulation as well as Latino and civil rights groups concerned that sanctions would lead employers to discriminate against anyone who looked or sounded foreign. An effort by the Carter White House to enact a compromise reform package in 1977 drew fire from all sides and ultimately died.
As efforts to address illegal immigration became mired in rancorous debate in the late 1970s, Congress created a Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy to broadly review U.S. immigration policy. Its 1982 report endorsed large-scale legal immigration, highlighting the social benefits of family reunification, the economic value of immigrant laborers and taxpayers, and the diplomatic and moral imperatives of admitting refugees. It also concluded that illegal immigration had an adverse affect on American society and recommended a reform package of employer sanctions, enhanced Border Patrol resources, and a legalization program for most of the undocumented population already living in the country. After protracted legislative wrangling, Congress finally took action to curb illegal immigration with enactment of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). The new law was a compromise package of watered-down employer sanctions, legalization for undocumented aliens living in the country since 1982, and a new Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program to appease growers. The measure proved highly successful in granting legal status to nearly 3 million undocumented aliens, but employer sanctions proved to be a “toothless tiger.”
By the late 1980s, it was clear to national policy makers that the IRCA had done virtually nothing to discourage illegal immigration. But legislators were eager to shift their attention to the politically painless task of expanding legal immigration. A welter of advocacy groups clamored for specific expansions in legal immigration opportunities. A “family coalition” of Asian, Latino, and other ethnic and human rights groups won an increase in the number of visas available for family reunification. A “business coalition” secured new preferences and visa allocations for employer-sponsored and skills-based immigration. At the end of the day, the Immigration Act of 1990 unified cosmopolitans and free market expansionists behind a 40 percent increase in annual visa allocations that benefited both family-based and employment-based immigration.
During the early 1990s, a grassroots movement in California mobilized against illegal immigration by advancing a measure, Proposition 187, that was designed to deny unauthorized migrants and their children welfare benefits, health care, and public education. Republican governor Pete Wilson and the state Republican organization threw their support behind the measure during the 1994 campaign, transforming it into a partisan issue. Proposition 187 carried the state with 59 percent of the vote. For the first time since 1952, Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress in 1994. New immigration subcommittee leadership and a special task force on immigration reform, chaired by California Republican Elton Gallegly, called for restrictive policy challenges. Their agenda included new crackdowns on criminal aliens and illegal immigration, denial of welfare benefits to immigrants, and new limits on legal admissions. The first two of these goals were secured in 1996 with passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWOA). Efforts to reduce legal immigration were defeated in the Senate by a cross-party alliance of cosmopolitans and free market expansionists.
In 1995 several prominent Republican congressional leaders expressed optimism behind closed doors that the immigration issue would cost Democrats blue-collar votes. At the start of the 1996 election, Pete Wilson made immigration control the defining issue of his short-lived presidential campaign; Pat Buchanan assailed third world immigration as a source of economic and cultural insecurity at home; and Bob Dole, the eventual Republican standard-bearer, associated himself with the stringent immigrant measures then working their way through Congress. The 1996 Republican platform pledged support for national legislation barring children of undocumented aliens from public schools.
Yet the results of the 1996 election left little doubt about two crucial developments: immigrants comprised the nation’s fastest growing voting bloc and Democrats were the immediate beneficiaries of their unanticipated electoral clout. Naturalization rates soared after 1995, as record numbers of aliens became citizens. More than 1 million people became naturalized in 1996 alone. At the same time as unprecedented numbers of aliens petitioned for naturalization in the mid-1990s, President Clinton instructed the INS to implement the so-called Citizenship USA initiative. In the words of the agency, the initiative “was designed to streamline the naturalization process and greatly increase naturalizations during 1996.” Voter registrations among Latinos grew by 1.3 million, or 28.7 percent, between 1992 and 1996; the percentage of Latinos on the voter rolls rose from 59 percent of those eligible in 1992 to 65 percent in 1996. The Latino Democratic vote increased from 60 percent in the 1992 presidential election to 72 percent in 1996. Asian voters, a smaller yet important swing bloc, increased their support for the Democratic ticket in the same years from 29 to 43 percent. Dole became the first Republican presidential candidate to lose Florida since Gerald Ford in 1976.
In the 2000 election, Republican national and state organizations drew up plans to attract new Asian and Latino voters. Texas governor George W. Bush was hailed by party leaders as the ideal candidate to court new immigrant voters, and he reminded Latinos throughout the campaign that early on he had “rejected the spirit of Prop 187,” opposed “English-only” proposals, and refused “to bash immigrants” when it was popular. Once in the White House, Bush created a special task force, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, to address illegal immigration anew. These efforts were preempted by the terrorist attacks of September 11, which created a new sense of urgency about the security risks posed by newcomers and porous borders. Soon after the attacks, the Justice Department prescribed special registration requirements for male noncitizens aged 14 years or older from Arab and Muslim countries. The USA Patriot Act of 2001 eased deportations and restricted admission for those with potential ties to terrorist organizations or those who may have the intention of committing a terrorist act. Bush’s efforts to relaunch comprehensive immigration reform in his second term, including a guest worker program, earned legalization, employer sanctions, and strengthened border enforcement—went nowhere. While the proposal was assailed by labor leaders and immigrant advocacy groups, the harshest attacks came from fellow conservatives both in Washington and at the grassroots who saw undocumented aliens as threats to national sovereignty, security, and identity.
In the winter of 2005, a punitive bill focused on border enforcement narrowly passed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. It proposed for the first time to make illegal presence in the United States a felony, and made it a crime for any persons or organizations to lend support to undocumented immigrants. The bill was also a direct attack on day laborer centers. From March through May 2006, demonstrations against the bill by largely Latino immigrants and their supporters, unprecedented in number and size, took place in cities and towns across the United States. These nationwide rallies, protests, and boycotts drew negative reactions from most Americans: just 24 percent had a favorable view of people who marched and protested for immigrant rights in major cities while 52 percent expressed unfavorable opinions. Overall, however, public opinion remained open to varied policy solutions: majorities favored legal status and earned citizenship for undocumented immigrants, stricter employer penalties, and tougher enforcement.
In the spring and summer of 2007, the Bush administration and a bipartisan Senate coalition led by Edward Kennedy negotiated “a grand bargain” that included significant new funding for border security and other interior enforcement measures. It imposed criminal penalties for illegal entry, which had previously been a misdemeanor offense, and proposed to replace the current family and employment–based admissions system with a “merit-based” system. The bill provided a new Z visa for undocumented immigrants that covered “a principal or employed alien, the spouse or elderly parent of that alien, and the minor children of that alien” currently living in the United States. The visa provided they pay fees and penalties that could total as much as 
8,000 and a “touchback provision” requiring the leader of the household to return home before applying for legal permanent residency status. The bill also contained a temporary Y worker program that would allow about 200,000 workers to be admitted for a two-year period that could be renewed twice, as long as the worker spent a period of one year outside of the United States between each admission.
The compromise Senate immigration plan was subject to intense media scrutiny and commentary, and the public response ranged from hostile to tepid. Many members of Congress were deluged with angry phone calls, emails, and letters from constituents and other activists. Surveys indicated that most Republicans, Democrats, and Independents opposed the measure, with only 23 percent in favor. Significantly, most Americans opposed the initiative not because they opposed “amnesty” or other proposals for legalizing millions of undocumented immigrants in the country (roughly two-thirds supported earned citizenship options over deportation), but rather because they had little trust that it would provide genuine border security. More than 80 percent in surveys said that they did not believe that the Bush-Senate compromise bill would reduce illegal immigration or enhance border control. Ultimately, the forces arrayed against this last-ditch reform effort were overwhelming, from the grassroots to the halls of Congress. The political minefield of immigration reform was shelved until after the 2008 election.
In the early twentieth century, the United States was in the midst of a “fourth wave” of immigration unprecedented in terms of its extraordinarily diverse origins and the dominance of newcomers from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. Wealthy democracies all face thorny policy challenges when they try to stimulate or restrict the flow of people across their borders. For Americans, immigration policy has long stirred ambivalence and political conflicts that defy the standard liberal-conservative divide, inspire battles among fellow partisans, and produce strange and fleeting bedfellows. The laissez-faire, restrictive, and expansive policies that have emerged from these political struggles over the course of U.S. history have had profound implications for the character and development of the nation.
See also anticommunism; citizenship; nativism.
FURTHER READING. Kitty Calavita, Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration and the I.N.S., 1992; Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life, 2002; David Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity, 1985; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, 2002; Hiroshi Motomura, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States, 2007; David Reimers, Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America, 1985; Daniel Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America, 2002; Aristide Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America, 2006.
DANIEL J. TICHENOR
Impeachment is one of the most potent and sharply debated powers of Congress. It is formidable because it is the principal, if not only, means through which Congress may remove presidents, Supreme Court justices, and certain other high-ranking federal officials for misconduct. While the popular understanding of this power has largely been shaped by the notable impeachment efforts against Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton and Associate Justice Samuel Chase, it is not possible to understand impeachment generally, much less its high-profile deployments, without analyzing the distinctive features of its application throughout U.S. history.
The text and original meaning of the Constitution illuminate the distinctive features of the federal impeachment process. In designing it, the founders distinguished the Constitution’s federal impeachment process from that which had been in existence in Britain and the colonies. Whereas the king was not subject to impeachment or removal, Article II, section IV of the Constitution explicitly makes the president, among others, subject to the impeachment process. Article II expressly narrows the range of people subject to impeachment from what it had been in England, where any citizen (other than a member of the royal family) could be impeached. This article explicitly restricts impeachment to “[t]he President, Vice-President and all civil officers of the United States.”
Article II further narrows the range of impeachable offenses to “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes or Misdemeanors.” Although the framers of the Constitution discussed “high Crimes or Misdemeanors” only in abstract terms as referring to political crimes or “great offenses” or “breaches of the public trust,” they hoped to restrict the scope of impeachable offenses to deviate from the parliamentary practice, which recognized no limit to the grounds for which people could be removed from office.
Conviction became more difficult than it had been in Great Britain, where the House of Lords could convict with a bare majority. In contrast, the founders divided the impeachment authority between the House and the Senate; gave the House the “sole power to impeach,” which required majority approval; and required at least two-thirds concurrence of the Senate for conviction and removal. The Senate was vested with trial authority, because the founders believed that senators would be better educated and more virtuous, well suited to making difficult judgments about procedures and removal, and resistant to majoritarian pressures than members of the House of Representatives.
Whereas the British Parliament could impose any punishment upon conviction, including death, Article I of the Constitution restricts the Senate’s power in impeachment trials “to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust, or Profit under the United States.” Article II expressly forbids the president from pardoning an individual for the offenses committed, while the king could have pardoned any person convicted in an impeachment trial. In contrast to Great Britain, where impeachment was understood to be a criminal proceeding, Article I provides that “the Party convicted [in an impeachment trial] shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to law.” Article III explicitly grants federal judges the special tenure of serving “during good Behavior.” The founders required the chief justice to preside over presidential impeachment trials to avoid a potential conflict of interest for the vice president, who usually presided over the Senate, in presiding over the trial of the one person standing between him and the presidency. The Constitution further requires senators to be “on oath or affirmation” when sitting in presidential impeachment trials. These requirements underscore the solemnity of such proceedings.
The founders left the scope of the federal impeachment power to be worked out by Congress over time. Since ratification, the House of Representatives has formally impeached 16 officials, including one Supreme Court justice (Samuel Chase) and two presidents (Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton). President Richard Nixon resigned shortly after the House Judiciary Committee approved three impeachment articles against him. In the course of these proceedings and other occasions on which the House has conducted or considered initiating impeachment inquiries, Congress has faced several significant constitutional questions. Historical patterns are important because they illuminate Congress’s deliberate judgments on the major constitutional questions arising in impeachment proceedings. Indeed, the impeachment judgments of Congress are effectively final, because they are not subject to judicial review—as held by the Supreme Court unanimously in Walter Nixon v. United States (1993)—or presidential veto. The realization that they have the final word on impeachment matters encourages most if not all members of Congress to make impeachment judgments that will withstand the scrutiny of history.
The first noteworthy pattern in Congress’s impeachment practices clarifies the meaning of “other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” as the basis for removal. Most scholars believe that this language refers to “political crimes” or abuses of power or injuries to the Republic. While they agree that not all indictable crimes are “political crimes” and vice versa, they disagree over how to identify which breaches of the public trust ought to qualify as grounds for removing high-ranking officials from office.
It is suggestive that, of the 16 men whom the House formally impeached, only five were impeached primarily or solely for indictable crimes, and one of the five (Alcee Hastings) had been formally acquitted of bribery prior to his impeachment and removal for that crime and for perjury. The House’s impeachment articles against the other 11 included misconduct for which anyone could be criminally punished. Four of the seven impeached officials convicted by the Senate were charged with nonindictable offenses. The remaining three (Harry Claiborne, Alcee Hastings, and Walter Nixon) were charged with indictable crimes. Both Claiborne and Nixon had been indicted, convicted in federal court, and exhausted their criminal appeals prior to their impeachment proceedings.
A second significant pattern in historical practices clarifies the related questions of whether impeachment is the exclusive means for removing judges and justices and whether Article III conditions judicial tenure on “good Behavior” and therefore allows judges or justices to be removed not only for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” but also for any misbehavior, including bad or erroneous decisions. A minority of scholars and members of Congress have argued that the “good Behavior” clause may also establish an alternative mechanism to impeachment for disciplining judges. But most scholars and members of Congress have maintained that a natural inference from the structure of the Constitution, backed by original meaning, is that the impeachment process is the exclusive means by which Congress may remove judges or justices. The “good Behavior” clause vests Article III judges with life tenure and thus protection from political retaliation for their judicial decisions, and impeaching and removing justices and judges for mistaken decisions would completely undermine their judicial independence.
The principle of judicial independence was vindicated in the only impeachment of a Supreme Court justice to date. In 1804, the House, controlled by Democrat-Republicans, impeached Associate Justice Samuel Chase, a fiercely partisan Federalist, based on claims that he had rendered flagrantly partisan rulings in the trials of two Republicans charged with violating the Federalist-backed Alien and Sedition Acts. A bare majority vote in the Senate to convict Chase fell short of the required two-thirds for conviction and removal. Much later, Chief Justice William Rehnquist construed Chase’s acquittal as a seminal decision upholding the “complete independence of federal judges from removal because of their judicial decisions.”
Subsequently, impeachment resolutions have been introduced in the House against two other Supreme Court justices: Chief Justice Earl Warren and Associate Justice William O. Douglas. In quickly dismissing inquiries against both justices, the House followed the principle initially laid down by Chase’s acquittal. On another occasion, President Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell and other White House aides successfully managed in 1969 to force Justice Abe Fortas to resign from the Supreme Court rather than face public embarrassment and possible impeachment because of a contract into which he briefly entered after joining the Court to provide legal counsel to a former client who had been subsequently convicted for securities fraud.
A third pattern in past impeachment practices suggests that the paradigmatic case for impeachment and removal has three elements: (1) a bad act such as serious abuse of power, (2) a bad or malicious intent, and (3) a link between the official’s misconduct and his official duties. Though Richard Nixon was not formally impeached, convicted, and removed from office, scholars agree that all these elements were evident in the misconduct charged against him by the House Judiciary Committee—using the powers of his office to obstruct investigations into his involvement in authorizing or covering up a burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters; ordering the FBI and IRS to harass his political enemies; and refusing to comply with a legislative subpoena requesting taped White House conversations, which the Supreme Court had unanimously ordered him to turn over to a special prosecutor. In contrast, many commentators and several senators explained President Clinton’s acquittal in 1998 on the absence of one or more of these three elements. Most historians also agree that in acquitting President Andrew Johnson on charges he had abused his powers by not complying with a federal law requiring him to get Senate approval before firing a cabinet member whom it had confirmed, the Senate had determined that Johnson’s misconduct was merely a policy difference with Congress for which removal was inappropriate.
A fourth pattern of impeachment practices reinforces the inference, derived from the specific requirement of at least two-thirds concurrence of the Senate for removal, that removal is only possible with widespread bipartisan support in the Senate. A supermajority is difficult to achieve in the Senate, particularly when the stakes are high, as they were in the impeachment trials of Presidents Johnson and Clinton and Justice Chase. Statistics bear this out, given that most people impeached by the House have been acquitted by the Senate (the 16 House impeachments have resulted in only seven Senate convictions). Indeed, the uniform opposition of all 45 Senate Democrats to President Clinton’s conviction for perjury and obstruction of justice highlights the enormous difficulty of securing a conviction in a presidential impeachment trial as long as the senators from the president’s party unanimously, or largely, support him. Since a political party rarely controls more than two-thirds of the Senate, presidential removal is only possible if the misconduct is sufficiently compelling to draw support for conviction from senators from both parties.
Fifth, historical practices supplement other sources of constitutional meaning to support the constitutionality of censure as an alternative to impeachment. For instance, the provision that “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to” removal from office or disqualification suggests that Congress may take any action against impeachable officials falling short of either of these sanctions, as seems to be the case with censure. Indeed, the House passed resolutions criticizing John Tyler, James Polk, James Buchanan, and several other high-ranking officials, while the Senate passed two resolutions critical of officials other than the president in the nineteenth century and censured Andrew Jackson for firing his treasury secretary for refusing to take actions undermining the national bank. While the Senate later expunged its censure of Jackson, neither the censure nor its subsequent expunging is binding authority on whether senators today may censure impeachable officials.
The historical records further suggest that impeachment is a relatively ineffective check against a popular president’s misconduct, particularly in the age of the 24-hour news cycle. If the enormous ramifications of removing a president dissuaded a hostile Senate from doing so with the hugely unpopular Andrew Johnson, as was the case, it should not be surprising that a later Senate would hesitate before removing a popular one who used the bully pulpit of the presidency to defend himself, as was the case with Bill Clinton. The congressional investigation into Watergate took more than two years before the discovery of the “smoking gun”—taped White House conversations—that led to Nixon’s resignation. The Clinton impeachment proceedings took roughly six months, among the shortest in history. Yet, throughout the constant media coverage of the proceedings, Clinton’s popularity increased while the popularity of, and support for, the Republican majority in the House and Senate seeking his ouster declined.
Indeed, Clinton’s case raises the issue of how serious the misconduct of a popular president must be to convince a majority of Americans or a supermajority in the Senate to support his ouster from office. Future members of Congress could hesitate before engaging in a prolonged investigation of a president’s misconduct for fear of alienating the public. They might further believe that the failure of the House to do any independent fact-finding prior to impeaching Clinton (one of only three instances when the House failed to do so) was a mistake that cost the House a valuable opportunity to cultivate the public’s confidence in its nonpartisan intent. Consequently, what Clinton’s acquittal may show is that, in the future, impeachment will be effective only in the rare circumstances in which the wrongdoing is so severe (and so clearly proven) as to galvanize the public and demand the president’s ouster or resignation.
A seventh significant pattern in impeachment practices concerns the nonreviewable decisions by the House and Senate on critical procedural issues. In its proceedings against President Clinton, the House held a final vote on the impeachment articles in a lame-duck session, to forego adopting a uniform standard for defining the impeachability of certain misconduct, and not to call witnesses or otherwise engage in independent fact-finding. In Clinton’s impeachment trial, senators resolved that each could decide for himself or herself on the applicability of the Fifth Amendment due process clause, burden of proof, rules of evidence, and the propriety of closed-door meetings. The senators also allowed three colleagues to vote on Clinton’s removal even though they had voted on his impeachment in the House before being elected to the Senate.
A final set of historical practices is the two instances in which the chief justice presided over presidential impeachment trials. In 1867 the House impeached President Andrew Johnson for illegally obstructing Reconstruction and the Tenure of Office Act, which required Senate approval prior to dismissal by the president of any officials whom he had nominated and the Senate had confirmed. Chief Justice Salmon Chase declared, at the outset, that “the Constitution has charged the Chief Justice with an important function in the [impeachment] trial . . . of the President.” Chase helped shape the rules adopted by the Senate to govern the president’s impeachment trial, which continue to this day and which include one that empowered him to rule initially on every procedural issue, subject to override by a majority of the Senate. Subsequently, the Senate overrode Chase’s evidentiary rulings 17 times. But most of his procedural rulings were upheld by the Senate even though they usually favored Johnson’s defense.
In 1999 Chief Justice Rehnquist presided over President Clinton’s trial. Whereas many senators had questioned Chief Justice Chase’s impartiality (and suspected he wanted to use the proceedings to further his presidential ambitions), Rehnquist commanded the respect of all senators, and there were no Senate challenges to or overrides of any of his procedural rulings.
Since President Clinton’s acquittal, the House has not initiated any impeachment proceedings. Some members of Congress and scholars insist justices may be impeached and removed for their decisions. And some insisted that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney should have been impeached and removed for their aggressive actions in the wake of the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. But Congress does not appear eager to use its impeachment power. Instead, it seems resigned to employ it, as many founders expected, only as a last resort to deal with severe presidential and judicial misconduct.
See also House of Representatives; Senate; Supreme Court.
FURTHER READING. Raoul Berger, Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems, 1973; Charles L. Black, Impeachment: A Handbook, Revised ed., 1998; Michael J. Gerhardt, The Federal Impeachment Process: A Constitutional and Historical Analysis, 2nd ed., 2000; Peter Charles Hoffer and N.E.H. Hull, Impeachment in America, 1635–1801, 1984; William H. Rehnquist, Grand Inquests: The Impeachment Trials of Justice Samuel Chase and President Andrew Johnson, 1992.
MICHAEL GERHARDT
The U.S. Constitution designated voting as the primary link between citizens and government, yet it also protected the politically salient rights of free speech, a free press, free assembly, and the right to petition. This framework recognized a broad arena of political activity outside of formal governmental institutions—one that would be funneled through individual voting in periodic elections to select legislators and presidential electors. Yet even before the Constitution was adopted, commentators were well aware that citizens’ political activity with formal government was not likely to be limited to the casting of ballots. In Federalist Paper number 10, James Madison famously warned of the dangers of faction, by which he meant “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interest of the community.”
Faction was not defined by the character of the group but by the relationship of its interest or passion to the rights of others or to the public good. Under Madison’s formulation, a majority could constitute a faction and, therefore, protections against the tyranny of the majority were also protections against these large factions. Although one could not extinguish the causes of faction without extinguishing liberty itself, Madison argued that a system of representative government within a large republic offered the best protection from the dangers of faction, a protection that would be impossible in a pure democracy. Consequently, the lineage from Madison’s “factions” to contemporary interest group politics is entwined with a succession of efforts by citizens, firms, and all varieties of organized interests to influence decisions made by representative institutions and executive agencies.
The historical development of interest group politics may be traced by following each element of this threefold name: politics is modified by group, group by interest. By extension, group politics differ in some important way from other kinds of politics, just as interest groups are distinct from other sorts of social groups. The emergence of recognizably modern interest group politics required the mobilization of groups outside of electoral politics, the development of methods by which such groups could influence policy outcomes, and the legitimation of these interests as recognized elements of a political system that extended beyond the boundaries of the formal political institutions themselves. Although the presence of organized interests near to government has steadily expanded throughout American history, opinions differ over whether these groups support democracy by expanding citizens’ access to politics or undermine it by allowing representatives of narrow interests to control policy making.
For the first half century of the nation’s existence, much political energy focused on the invention of “group politics.” One important stream of developments gave rise to political parties; another produced the distinctive breed of “private organizations with public purposes” that are the ancestors of the modern nonprofit sector. Yet, as discussed by Alexis de Tocqueville, voluntary associations were particularly intriguing as a vehicle for “shadow government” and for the shaping and mobilization of political opinion. Tocqueville arrived in the United States in 1831, when such large-scale voluntary associations were a relatively novel phenomenon. Fueled by religious revivals, large-scale missionary movements had forged a new “confessional politics” in which individual sins were linked to the sins of the nation. Focused on moral issues from the protection of the Sabbath through temperance and, most consequentially, abolition, this fusing of religious revival to national policy created a powerful template for doing politics not only outside of formal institutions but also outside political parties. Even where the specifically religious impulse was muted, such popular movements made use of the protected freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly to mobilize popular support and bring pressure on elected representatives. These new forms of “group politics” remained controversial, exemplified in the 1830s and 1840s by congressional refusal to accept petitions in support of the abolition of slavery.
While the abolitionist movement itself eventually entered party politics, for the remainder of the nineteenth century, mobilized groups continued their efforts to influence the outcomes of formal governmental processes. Often, the most direct path led directly into electoral politics, so state and local campaigns saw periodic insurgencies by new parties that championed the concerns of labor, of farmers, of anti-Catholics, or of anti-Masons, along with many other causes. “Group politics” could become “third-party politics” with relative ease, but there was not yet a model for a stable, legitimate, nonelectoral alignment of extrapartisan groups with formal governmental institutions.
That model was elaborated at the turn of the twentieth century, in part by activists who were veterans of the failed third-party efforts of the 1870s and 1880s. While the Populist Party led another surge along the path from social movements to political parties, fusing with the Democratic Party in the elections of 1896, other organized groups explored different kinds of alignments with legislatures and government officials. Some of these efforts centered on influencing those who ran for office, notably by supporting the introduction of primary elections and then seeking to “pledge” candidates to support specific policies if elected. Incumbents were also subjected to new forms of accountability as labor and agrarian groups developed the technology of “roll call vote” scoring, a process that required a group to determine which issues were specifically in its interest and then to identify the precise vote that would provide the most meaningful evidence of a candidate’s position. To accomplish this, labor unionists, clubwomen, and agrarian activists immersed themselves in the intricacies of parliamentary rules, recognizing that seemingly obscure procedural votes were often the most consequential ones. As pledges were extracted and votes tabulated, organized movements would then make use of speeches and publications to educate their members about which politicians were most worthy of support and which should be opposed.
This educational component of popular politics did not end with elections. As organized groups became more familiar with the process of policy making they also recognized the advantages of expertise that could be used in the context of legislative hearings or as support for drafting bills. The intensification of interest group activity is evident in the numbers of groups testifying in congressional hearings. According to Daniel Tichenor and Richard Harris, the number of interest groups and private corporations grew almost fourfold in the first decade of the 1900s, from roughly 800 to 3,000. Beyond the growth in numbers, the differences between corporation and interest group representatives was also striking: corporations tended to present narrow, local concerns while other groups were more attuned to broad policy issues. Even with the growing presence of trade associations representing industrywide concerns, various kinds of citizens groups and trade unions continued to account for roughly half of congressional appearances through 1917.
During the Progressive Era, a wide variety of groups developed new methods for influencing political outcomes, both through new provisions for primary elections and direct democracy (initiative, referendum, and recall), and by inserting themselves within legislative investigations and deliberations. The rise of this seemingly new kind of “pressure politics” was linked to the declining role of political parties. This popular mode of policy making reached a zenith with the adoption of constitutional amendments establishing prohibition and enfranchising women. Yet for all these accomplishments, the legitimacy of these extrainstitutional interventions in political decision making was far from established.
Madison’s original definition of the term faction turned on the issue of whether collective pursuit of interests or passions was “adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interest of the community.” Even movement activists had hesitated in the face of this concern; in 1892, for example, the California State Grange explicitly rejected a proposal that the convention consider proposed amendments to the state constitution and that it inform the state’s farmers of where their interests lay in these matters. Such matters were to be left to the consciences of individual voters who, at least according to republican theory, were to vote for “the best man” who would then make legislative decisions in light of the common good rather than in terms of the consequences for his own constituents. Organized groups were thus reluctant to move into pressure politics, particularly when they could not make encompassing moral claims grounded in moral virtue or national destiny. The efforts of individuals and companies to secure favorable legislative action were often enmeshed with the “old lobby” of the nineteenth century, which later commentators portrayed as a web of corruption and, at times, seduction. Not surprisingly, some legislatures responded by adopting policies to limit these extralegislative influences, often appealing to the Trist v. Child (1874) ruling in which the Supreme Court declined to enforce a contractual claim for a contingency fee for lobbying Congress for relief related to the Mexican-American War. By the late nineteenth century, some state legislatures began to adopt laws requiring lobbyists to register and regulating campaign contributions, indeed prohibiting such contributions from corporations in some cases.
By the early twentieth century, facts on the ground had outrun theory. Political scientists were staking a disciplinary claim to “group politics,” arguing, as Arthur F. Bentley did, that “if a law is in question, we find that our statement of it in terms of the group of men it affects . . . we can state its actual value in the social process at the given time in terms of the groups of men for whose sake it is there: a group of politicians and a number of groups of voters holding the prominent places.” Others distinguished the “new lobby” from the old, noting, as E. Pendleton Herring expressed it, the “Washington offices of the associations, societies, leagues, institutes, boards, and federations organized on a nationwide scale to-day for the great lobbies in the capital. By comparison the representatives of corporations, the patronage brokers, the ‘wire-pullers,’ the crows of old-style lobbyists pale in significance. The men with the power are these spokesmen of organized groups.”
As business relationships with the federal government were increasingly mediated by industry associations, the lineages of group politics and the business lobby began to merge into what would come to be labeled interest group politics. With the intensification of the federal government’s role in the economy, driven by both Depression-era regulatory politics and mobilization for World War II, these ties would grow still stronger. They inspired new labels such as “iron triangles” and President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” (which, in its first formulation, was the “military-industrial-congressional complex”).
Yet, if political scientists had begun to normalize this development, these groups still drew considerable condemnation. Congressional efforts to regulate lobbyists repeatedly failed and their numbers continued to multiply to an estimated 6,000 by the late 1930s. This “small army,” in the words of journalist Kenneth Crawford, was “busy in Washington burning the bridges between the voter and what he voted for.” This contrast between interest groups that advanced selfish corporate interests and those that promoted public interests bedeviled the efforts of postwar political science to develop a general theory of interest group politics.
Following the Second World War, political scientists mounted repeated efforts to document both the population of organized interests and their implications for democratic politics. These studies addressed questions of which interests became organized and which remained latent, which techniques were used by organized groups to influence policy outcomes, and whether such efforts actually had political consequences. Particular attention focused on if and how the expansion of government led either to increases in the numbers of organized interests or changes in their character. Although the precise magnitude of these changes depended heavily on the sources and methods used by researchers—directories of groups headquartered in Washington, D.C., or records of congressional testimony—there was consensus that the numbers of organized groups were increasing. One analysis found that the total (listed) population of associations had increased from 5,843 in 1959 to 23,298 in 1995. Within this total, trade associations had accounted for 39 percent in 1959 but only 18 percent by 1995. In the interim, categories such as those of public affairs and social welfare had increased their share of the total interest group population. Studies also explored the consequences of organized business interests, large membership organizations, and advocacy organizations for policy formation. Policy domains were documented as distinctive networks of elected officials, public agencies, organized interests, and private organizations.
The diversity of organized interests, as well as the divergent assessments of their role in American democracy, remains an obstacle to the development of either systematic evidence or theoretical consensus. The relationship between interest groups and political decision making continues to be closely—and often ineffectively—policed, with new variations on lobbyist registration, limits on campaign contributions, and time-limited prohibitions on former officials lobbying their own agencies or one-time colleagues. Yet because the constitutional framework of elections and legislatures provides no institutionalized access for “faction”—mobilized groups with shared yet less than universal interests or passions—interest group politics will continue to function as an “extralegal” mode of political activity.
See also campaign law and finance.
FURTHER READING. Frank R. Baumgartner and Beth L. Leech, Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and in Political Science, 1998; Arthur F. Bentley, The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures, 1908; Elisabeth S. Clemens, The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925, 1997; Kenneth G. Crawford, The Pressure Boys: The Inside Story of Lobbying in America, 1939; Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, 1961; E. Pendleton Herring, “Group Representation before Congress,” Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1929; Edward O. Laumann and David Knoke, The Organizational State: Social Choice in National Policy Domains, 1987; Kay Lehman Schlozman and John T. Tierney, Organized Interests and American Democracy, 1986; Daniel J. Tichenor and Richard A. Harris, “Organized Interests and American Political Development,” Political Science Quarterly 117 (2002–3), 587–612; David B. Truman, The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion, 1951; Jack L. Walker, Jr., Mobilizing Interest Groups in America: Patrons, Professions, and Social Movements, 1991; Michael P. Young, Bearing Witness against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement, 2006.
ELISABETH S. CLEMENS
In 1990, following an eight-year war against Iran, Iraq President Saddam Hussein sought to rebuild his battered nation by pressuring neighboring Sunni Arab states into raising international oil prices and forgiving Iraq’s substantial war debts. Hussein’s attention focused primarily on Kuwait. The Iraqis had long coveted Kuwait, both for its oil and access to the Persian Gulf. Furthermore, Hussein alleged that the Kuwaitis had stolen oil from Iraq through illegal “slant-drilling” in the Rumaila oil field and by exceeding production quotas established by Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. When the Kuwaitis rejected Iraqi demands for compensation, Iraq began massing troops along its border with Kuwait.
Previously, the administration of President George H. W. Bush had attempted to maintain friendly relations with Iraq by providing, in the words of National Security Directive (NSD) 26, “economic and political incentives for Iraq to moderate its behavior and to increase our influence with Iraq.” During a meeting with Hussein on July 25, 1990, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie conveyed the U.S. desire for peaceful resolution of Iraq’s differences with Kuwait. The United States did not take additional steps to prevent an invasion of Kuwait because other Arab leaders and the Central Intelligence Agency had assured President Bush that Iraq would not invade Kuwait. Consequently, the United States was caught completely unprepared when Iraqi troops overran Kuwait on August 2 and annexed it six days later.
President Bush’s national security team agreed that Iraq could not be allowed to remain in Kuwait, since that would give Iraq control of approximately 20 percent of the world’s total oil reserves and leave it in a position to threaten Saudi Arabia. This affirmed the Carter Doctrine of 1980, which committed the United States to preventing any power from dominating the Persian Gulf and its oil reserves. After securing the consent of the Saudi royal family, the Bush administation initiated Operation Desert Shield on August 7 and immediately began deploying the first of 250,000 U.S. troops and their equipment to Saudi Arabia.
Disagreement arose over the question of using force to evict Iraq from Kuwait. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, initially opposed military action and argued that UN sanctions could achieve the same end. Bush’s national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, and his secretary of defense, Richard Cheney, disagreed with Powell and convinced the president not to accept “another Munich.” Bush warned Iraq on August 5 (the day before the United Nations imposed a complete embargo on Iraq), “This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.” On August 20, the president signed NSD 45, which, in light of U.S. “vital” interests in the Persian Gulf (most notably “access to oil and the security and stability of key friendly states in the region”), called for the “immediate, complete, and unconditional withdrawal of all Iraqi forces from Kuwait.” By October, Powell and the commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM, which is responsible for planning and conducting U.S. military operations in the Middle East), General Norman Schwarzkopf, had developed Operation Desert Storm, an ambitious air, land, and sea plan that called for more than 500,000 U.S. troops to evict Iraq from Kuwait.
On November 29, 1991, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 678, giving Iraq a deadline of January 15, 1991, to evacuate Kuwait and authorizing the U.S.-led multinational coalition of over 30 nations (many of which, such as Saudi Arabia, Great Britain, Egypt, and France, provided large numbers of combat troops; others, such as Germany and Japan, provided financial assistance) to use any measures it deemed necessary to enforce compliance. The only remaining obstacle for the Bush administration was the U.S. Senate, which was controlled by the Democratic Party. Scarred by the experience of the Vietnam War and reluctant to give the president carte blanche, most Democrats supported a policy of coercive diplomacy, as embodied by Security Council Resolution 661, adopted on August 6, which imposed a total embargo against Iraq. Such sanctions, Democrats hoped, would eventually compel Iraq to abandon Kuwait without the need for force.
In spite of such opposition and Cheney’s insistence that the administration did not need legislative authorization to proceed, the president was determined to secure congressional approval. Following three days of debate, a resolution authorizing the use of force narrowly passed both houses of Congress, thanks largely to the support of Democrats such as Senator Al Gore (Tennessee). Eleven years later, Gore would again make headlines when he condemned the administration of George W. Bush’s march to war. The 2004 presidential campaign of Democratic Senator John Kerry (Massachusetts), on the other hand, would be hamstrung by the fact that he opposed the 1991 Gulf War but voted in favor of the use of force in 2003.
Desert Storm commenced on January 17, 1991, with a bombing campaign against Iraqi military and civilian targets and was followed by a land invasion on February 24. After coalition forces outflanked the Iraqi military and threatened to cut off their line of retreat, the Iraqis began falling back on February 26, setting fire to Kuwaiti oil wells along the way. Lacking air cover, however, large numbers of Iraqis were slaughtered by coalition planes along the “highway of death” toward Iraq. At the urging of General Powell, President Bush declared a unilateral ceasefire the following day. By war’s end, the United States had suffered a total of 293 dead, while Iraq suffered well over 20,000 military and civilian fatalities. Although coalition casualties during the fighting were light, tens of thousands of veterans later suffered from a variety of aliments that are collectively known as Gulf War Syndrome.
The postwar situation presented problems for the United States. For one thing, the Iraqis used the ceasefire to evacuate substantial portions of their elite Republican Guard divisions from Kuwait. Schwarzkopf also assented to an Iraqi request that they be allowed to use helicopters to ferry troops from Kuwait. In fact, the Iraqis used their remaining army units and aircraft to brutally suppress an uprising by Iraqi Shiites, who had been urged to rebel by the United States. While many in the U.S. government wanted to use the Shiites to destabilize the Ba’ath regime, leading figures such as Scowcroft, Powell, and Cheney opposed any move to assist the Shiites or march on Baghdad, since they did not want to responsible for establishing a new government in Iraq and rebuilding the country. Furthermore, they feared that if Hussein were toppled, Iraq would break apart. The main beneficiary of that situation would be Iran, which would extend its influence into the primarily Shiite provinces of southern Iraq, an area that contained most of Iraq’s oil reserves and bordered both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
In one of the war’s great ironies, Hussein, despite his catastrophic military defeat, managed to remain in power for another 12 years. His primary opponent, President Bush, fared less well. Although he enjoyed high approval ratings for his handling of the Gulf War, Bush’s popularity sagged due to a stagnating economy. As a result, he was defeated in the 1992 presidential election by Bill Clinton, whose campaign revolved around the memorable expression, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
For the next 12 years, the United States pursued a policy containing Iraq. U.S. and British warplanes enforced “no fly zones” over northern and southern Iraq and the UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) was established to verify that the nation had dismantled its substantial programs for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Despite Iraqi interference, UN weapons inspectors managed to dismantle most of Iraq’s WMD infrastructure before withdrawing in December 1998, after the chief of UNSCOM reported that Iraq was not complying with inspections. Shortly thereafter, the United States and Britain launched Operation Desert Fox, a three-day campaign of aerial bombardment and cruise missile attacks against suspected Iraqi WMD sites and military installations. Although the Clinton administration was criticized for taking only limited action against Iraq in 1998, following the conclusion of the second Iraq war, the Iraq Survey Group (an Anglo-American-Australian team of weapons inspectors established in 2003 to find Iraq’s WMD) discovered that UN weapons inspections had been more successful than previously thought. Since Western intelligence services lacked an effective espionage network within Iraq, they had no way of knowing this.
Throughout the 1990s, the consensus of U.S. policy makers was that containment was the most effective policy for dealing with Iraq. Some outspoken opponents, such as Paul Wolfowitz (one of Cheney’s deputies at the Pentagon in 1991), however, argued strongly in favor of regime change. In January 1998, an organization called the Project for a New American Century sent a letter to President Clinton asserting that the United States could no longer rely on UN inspections or containment to prevent Hussein from threatening the Middle East. Among the signatories of the letter were numerous prominent “neoconservatives” and future members of the second Bush administration. Their recommendations did not receive significant support within the American foreign policy establishment, however, and when the second Bush administration came to power in January 2001, it initially pursued a policy of “smart sanctions” designed to ease the humanitarian burden on Iraq’s civilian population.
The U.S. government’s attitude changed completely following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The attacks proved to be the catalyst for the invasion of Iraq for fear that state sponsors of terrorism—such as Iraq—could provide radical Islamic terrorists with WMD. Accordingly, by the summer of 2002, the administration of George W. Bush publicly embraced the concept of preventive war. In a speech that June at the United States Military Academy at West Point, the president stated that the United States would “confront the worst threats before they emerge.” Furthermore, even before the 2001 terrorist attacks, proponents of regime change in Iraq had argued that prior U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East had created the popular basis for the rise of terrorist organization such as al-Qaeda through its support for authoritarian regimes, and that the United States needed to aggressively promote democratization in the Middle East.
The administration formally unveiled its new foreign policy on September 20, 2002, when it published the National Security Strategy of the United States, whose tenets came to be known as the Bush Doctrine. Among its highlights was an explicit repudiation of the cold war concept of deterrence in favor of “preemptive” and, if necessary, unilateral military action.
The Bush administration began warning of the threat posed by Iraqi WMD before the 2001 military campaign in Afghanistan had even ended, and throughout 2002. In his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush named three nations—Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, which he collectively called the “axis of evil”—that were actively developing WMD and might supply such weapons to terrorists. In August, Vice President Richard Cheney unequivocally stated that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction; there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” Quoting President Bush, Cheney warned, “Time is not on our side,” and that the “risks of inaction are far greater than the risks of action.”
The tipping point came in October, when the government distributed a national intelligence estimate concerning Iraq’s “continuing” WMD programs. With a majority in the Senate, congressional Democrats could have derailed the president’s plans, but the terrorist attacks of the previous year had left them on the defensive. With midterm elections quickly approaching, and the president’s popularity soaring in the wake of the terrorist attacks and the seemingly successful war in Afghanistan, congressional Democrats reckoned that they could not wage an effective campaign on national security and sought to shift the emphasis back to domestic issues such as health care and corporate scandals by supporting the Bush administration’s stance on Iraq. Consequently, on October 16, 2002, Congress authorized Bush to “defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.” This electoral gambit failed, however, and Democrats were defeated in the 2002 midterm elections.
The Bush administration faced a stiffer challenge at the United Nations. The Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441 in November 2002, which declared that Iraq was in material breach of previous resolutions and that it had 30 days to accept the reentry of weapons inspectors. Months of inspections failed, however, to turn up evidence of an illicit Iraqi WMD program. In spite of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech before the Security Council on February 5, 2003, describing alleged Iraqi violations of existing Security Council resolutions and cooperation with Islamist terrorist groups, several members, most notably France and Germany, remained opposed to military action. Consequently, the United States and the 48 other nations that comprised the “coalition of the willing” (of which only four actually provided combat troops for the invasion) moved to the next stage. On March 16, the United States ordered all UN weapons inspectors to leave Iraq and, the following day, gave Hussein and his family 48 hours to seek exile. On the morning of March 20, the United States and its allies began Operation Iraqi Freedom with a massive aerial bombardment of Baghdad and a land invasion from Kuwait.
It soon became apparent that U.S. war planning was flawed for two reasons: it relied on too few troops to occupy Iraq, and it ignored the question of postwar planning. As early as November 2001, CENTCOM had been charged with drawing up a plan. At the time, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pushed for a small, highly mobile invasion force, over the objections of senior officers such as Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, who warned that the United States would require a large presence in Iraq for an indefinite period in order to guarantee postwar peace and security. Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz publicly ridiculed such concerns and asserted that the U.S. occupation of Iraq would be self-financing through Iraqi oil exports. In fact, U.S. government expenditures during the first four years of the war exceeded 2 billion per week.
Although the small force envisaged by Rumsfeld (145,000 U.S. and British soldiers) quickly routed the Iraqi Army, it was unable to stabilize the country after the collapse of Hussein’s Ba’ath regime. Following the fall of Baghdad on April 9, widespread looting broke out across the city in front of helpless U.S. troops. The scene was repeated across the country, with dire consequences for U.S. forces, since insurgents looted arms depots and secured large supplies of small arms and explosives.
After President Bush declared an end to “major combat operations” on May 1, 2003, the United States created a Coalition Provisional Authority to govern Iraq. The original head of the CPA was retired General Jay Garner, who planned to quickly transfer the responsibility for governing Iraq to local authorities and rely on the Iraqi Army to maintain order. Garner also clashed with Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of a prominent Iraqi exile group (the Iraqi National Congress) that had provided much of the flawed evidence of Iraqi WMD to the U.S. government who aspired to high political office in post-Ba’ath Iraq. Garner soon fell afoul of the leadership in Washington and was replaced by a former diplomat, L. Paul Bremer, in May. Bremer subsequently made two momentous decisions. On May 16, he issued an order expelling all Ba’ath Party members from Iraqi civil service. One week later, he demobilized the Iraqi Army and laid off the staff of the Interior Ministry and Hussein’s personal security forces. These disgruntled soldiers and Ba’ath Party members provided the nucleus for an insurgency that claimed the lives of thousands of coalition soldiers and untold numbers of Iraqi soldiers, police, and civilians.
While it was hoped that the capture of Hussein in December 2003 would stabilize Iraq, two events in early 2004 shattered any such illusions. First, on March 31, a convoy carrying four private U.S. military contractors was ambushed by insurgents in Fallujah, and the contractors’ charred remains were later hung from a nearby bridge. Much of the city was subsequently destroyed, and its population displaced, when U.S. Marines stormed it at great cost in November. Second, at the end of April, reporter Seymour Hersh revealed the torture of Iraqi detainees by U.S. Army guards at the Abu Ghraib prison. The U.S. government claimed that the excesses had been committed by only a handful of soldiers and were not the result of official policy. Nevertheless, the sexually explicit nature of the offenses, as well as the fact that they took place in a prison that had been used by the Ba’ath regime, stripped away much of the U.S. occupation’s moral legitimacy, both in Iraq and abroad.
Despite the deteriorating the situation in Iraq, President Bush won reelection against John Kerry in 2004 by the narrowest margin for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916. The war in Iraq was probably not the decisive issue during the campaign, since matters such as terrorism, same-sex marriage, the economy, and health care also received much attention. Furthermore, Kerry did not advocate a withdrawal from Iraq. Rather, he criticized the president for poor management of postwar Iraq and argued that the United States needed allies to help stabilize that nation. Kerry’s initial support of the resolution authorizing the use of force, and the fact that he continued to argue as late as August 2004 that “it was the right authority” for a president to have, left him vulnerable to withering attacks by the Republicans, who derided him as an opportunistic “flip-flopper.”
The political costs of the war for the Republican Party only became evident during the 2006 congressional midterm elections. In November 2005, Democrat John Murtha (Pennsylvania), a senior congressman with close ties to the U.S. military, withdrew his support for the war and offered a plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq at the “earliest practicable date.” Although Democrats remained divided over how quickly any withdrawal should proceed, most rallied around Murtha’s call for a “strategic redeployment.” Sagging popular support for the war, combined with a series of scandals involving high-ranking Republicans and Bush’s unpopularity following his failed bid to privatize Social Security and his administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina, handed the Democrats an electoral triumph as spectacular as that of the Republicans in 1994.
Although President Bush acknowledged that the results of the 2006 election reflected substantial public discontent over his handling of the war and accepted the resignation of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, he remained adamantly opposed to withdrawal from Iraq. Consequently, in May 2007, Bush vetoed a bill funding U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan because it included a timeline for withdrawal. It was only the second time he had used that power since becoming president.
As an alternative to the “redeployment” plans advocated by Democrats and the Iraq Study Group (a bipartisan panel created by Congress in 2006 to provide recommendations on future policy concerning Iraq), in January 2007, Bush unveiled a new counterinsurgency strategy that featured the deployment of an additional 20,000 troops to Iraq to “clear and secure” insurgent-controlled areas in Baghdad, under the direction of the newly installed commander of Multi-National Force–Iraq, General David Petraeus, a noted expert on counterinsurgency warfare and author of the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The aim of the 2007 “troop surge” was not, however, to achieve a decisive military victory over the Sunni insurgency. Rather, it was to provide enough stability within Baghdad to promote political reconciliation between rival sectarian and ethnic factions within the Iraqi government and prevent a civil war. Since congressional Democrats lacked the votes either to override a presidential veto concerning withdrawal or to cut off spending for the war, the questions of when and how the United States would eventually withdraw from Iraq were left to be settled after the 2008 presidential election.
See also foreign policy and domestic politics since 1933; war and politics.
FURTHER READING. Andrew J. Bacevich and Efraim Inbar, eds., The Gulf War of 1991 Reconsidered, 2003; Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, 2006; William Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East, 2004; James Fallows, Blind into Baghdad: America’s War in Iraq, 2006; Lawrence Freedman, A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East, 2008; Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, 1990–1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order, 1993; Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn B. Young, eds., The New American Empire: A 21st Century Teach-In on U.S. Foreign Policy, 2005; Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra 2: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, 2006; Gary R. Hess, Presidential Decisions for War: Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and Iraq, 2009; Michael Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Petroleum Dependency, 2004; Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945, 2008; James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet, 2004; National Security Council, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, downloadable from http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/nsc/nss/2002/index.html; Clayton R. Newell, The A to Z of the Persian Gulf War, 1990–1991, 2007; George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, 2005; Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006; Ian Rutledge, Addicted to Oil: America’s Relentless Drive for Energy Security, 2005; Micah L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf, eds., The Gulf War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions, 1991; Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, 2007; Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, 2004; Idem, State of Denial, 2006; Idem, The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006–2008, 2008; Steve A. Yetiv, The Persian Gulf Crisis, 1997.
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