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"Testing Theories of Congressional-Presidential Interaction with Veto Override Rates" (henceforth "Veto Override Rates") offers several tests of two models of vetoes and finds the models wanting. The paper concludes that something is seriously amiss with the models. In my view, the problem lies not in the models but in the tests. Understanding why the tests miss the mark is helpful in understanding models of veto politics, and more generally in thinking about testing strategies when multiple models analyze different causal mechanisms that hold under different circumstances. I should note immediately that the effort in the paper to think hard about override rates is admirable; it simply does not go far enough.

The scholarly traditions that explain the federal judicial state building in the United States are countered with a new theory of federal courts. A game theoretic Congressional centered account & a judicial court centered account are compared to the new approach of a jurisdiction game applied to the Fugitive Slave Act. The jurisdiction game puts the federalism back into federal court analysis by including the preferences of state voters, states rightists & moderns. The apparent preference reversals of antebellum abolitionists & slave holders, the passage of the Removal Act of 1875 & state sovereign immunity are integrated into the analysis. This model overcomes the current silence over the national versus state power in theories of federal courts. The integration of institutions & preferences is useful to explore the consequences for federal judicial power on deep preferences, although it says little about the origins of shifting passions & structure. Figures, Appendixes, References. J. Harwell

"Theorizing the U.S. Supreme Court" published on by Oxford University Press.

What effect does regulatory auditing by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) have on the production of regulations in the agencies? In particular, does targeting an agency for heavy regulatory auditing inhibit its production of regulations, a "chilling" effect? Does heavy auditing encourage it to substitute multiple small regulations in place of single large one, "OIRA avoidance"? We present an early empirical analysis of these questions by estimating regulation production functions for federal agencies, using data from the Unified Agenda from 1995 to 2010. We attempt to distinguish the differential effects of regulatory auditing from appointments into the agencies, leveraging off exogenous variation created by independent regulatory commissions. Our data uncover no evidence of a chilling effect in the production of economically significant regulations due to the Bush administration's regulatory auditing, relative to the Clinton or early Obama administrations. Nor do we find any evidence of OIRA avoidance. We do find some evidence that the Bush administration reduced the production of noneconomically significant regulations overall. However, the effect appears to be due to appointments in the agencies. Overall, the results raise questions about the efficacy of presidential efforts to control the regulatory state and how best to evaluate those efforts.