Respective Roles of Senate and President in the Making and Abrogation of Treaties—The Original Intent of the Framers of the Constitution Historically Examined

The first part of the present article examines the specific question of the placement in the constitutional system of the power to terminate a treaty originally ratified by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, two-thirds of the members present concurring. The power of terminating a treaty is, of course, only a particular segment or subdivision of the far more inclusive power of determining the foreign policy of the Nation. Accordingly, after considering the evidence bearing directly upon the narrow question of treaty abrogation, the present article turns to the larger question of the relationship the framers intended to establish between the Senate and the President in shaping the nation\u27s course in foreign affairs. The remainder of the article, beginning with Part III, deals with various aspects of this inclusive problem, seeking through contemporaneous historical evidence to ascertain the intention of the framers of the Constitution on each matter. Among the matters to be examined in successive sections are the following: The definitions given to the concepts of legislative and of executive authority respectively by political theorists of the centuries leading up to the eighteenth; the distinctions that Americans had already drawn between the two sorts of power in the documents and practices of the old congress under the Confederation; the discussions in the Federal Constitutional Convention of 1787 concerning the proper distribution between Senate and President of responsibility for making—and altering—foreign policy; and finally the precise meaning of the treaty clause that the framers incorporated in the Constitution

Impeachment

A book review essay considering Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems, by Raoul Berger (1973)

Genomic mapping of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine in the human brain

Methylation at the 5-position of cytosine is a well-studied epigenetic pathway. In addition to 5-methylcytosine (5mC), substantial amounts of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) also referred to as the sixth DNA base have been detected in certain tissues, most notably the brain. However, the genomic distribution of this cytosine modification is unknown. Here, we have used an immunoprecipitation technique (5hmC-IP) to examine the occurrence of 5hmC in DNA from human brain frontal lobe tissue. The distribution of 5hmC was compared to that of 5mC. We show that 5hmC is more selectively targeted to genes than is 5mC. 5hmC is particularly enriched at promoters and in intragenic regions (gene bodies) but is largely absent from non-gene regions. 5hmC peaks at transcription start sites did not correlate with gene expression levels for promoters with intermediate or high CpG content. However, the presence of 5hmC in gene bodies was more positively correlated with gene expression levels than was the presence of 5mC. Promoters of testis-specific genes showed strong 5mC peaks in brain DNA but were almost completely devoid of 5hmC. Our data provide an overview of the genomic distribution of 5hmC in human brain and will set the stage for further functional characterization of this novel DNA modification