Extensions on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment: The Influence of Biological Factors on Assessments of Impairment

Because the framers of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment were so prescient in their creation of this legislation, it behooves subsequent scholars to examine additional potential concerns that would not have entered the debate forty years ago. Huge advances have been made in the area of biological and genetic medical knowledge, and this progress could not have been foreseen at the time the original Amendment was written. Yet in the interim, such information has become much more accessible. It becomes important to raise these questions moving forward because political opponents may take advantage of these new concerns, as they arise, and use them for personal political advantage to the detriment of the legitimacy of American political governance. As a result, the concerns addressed in this Article regard future assessments of disability, and which factors concerning potential future vulnerability to particular diseases or impairments might warrant the determination of such disability. To be clear, these questions remain open in Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, and yet they concern important factors in deciding what constitutes sufficient disability to remove a President from office. This Article begins with an outline of some of these factors, provides two illustrative examples, and then concludes with suggestions about how to address some of the concerns

Preying on Neighborhoods: First Half of 2007 Foreclosure Update

This report is one of a series of analyses of the foreclosures in Chicago performed by NTIC since 1999. The report documents the role Adjustible Rate Mortgages (ARMs) have played in the current foreclosure crisis and infers changes in lending patterns. The report also includes a summary of action steps being advocated by the Save the American Dream campaign (http://www.savetheamericandream.org), a project of NTIC

Climates of suspicion: 'chemtrail' conspiracy narratives and the international politics of geoengineering

Concurrent with growing academic and policy interest in ‘geoengineering’ the global climate in response to climate change, a more marginal discourse postulating the existence of a climate control conspiracy is also proliferating on the Internet. Here, the term ‘chemtrails’ is used interchangeably with the term geoengineering to describe the belief that the persistent contrails left by aeroplanes provide evidence that a secret programme of large scale weather and climate modification is on-going. Despite recent calls for greater appreciation of the diverse ways in which people conceive of and relate to ideas of climate control, and widespread acknowledgement of the importance of democratic public engagement in governance of geoengineering, the chemtrail conspiracy narrative has received very little attention in academic work to date. This paper builds on work highlighting the instability of the distinction between ‘paranoid’ and ‘normal’ views, and examines the chemtrail conspiracy narrative as a discourse rather than a pathology (either psychological or sociological). The analysis finds that while some elements of the chemtrail narrative do not lend themselves to democratic processes of deliberation, and potential for engagement with more mainstream discourse appears to be low, nevertheless certain elements of the discourse (such as the moral outrage at the idea of powerful elites controlling the climate, or the importance of emotional and spiritual connections to weather and climate) highlight concerns of relevance to mainstream geoengineering debates. Furthermore, the pervasive suspicion that characterises the narrative and its reminder of the key role that trust plays in knowledge creation and the justification of beliefs, signals what is likely to be a perennial issue in the emerging international politics of geoengineering

Extensions on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment: The Influence of Biological Factors on Assessments of Impairment

Because the framers of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment were so prescient in their creation of this legislation, it behooves subsequent scholars to examine additional potential concerns that would not have entered the debate forty years ago. Huge advances have been made in the area of biological and genetic medical knowledge, and this progress could not have been foreseen at the time the original Amendment was written. Yet in the interim, such information has become much more accessible. It becomes important to raise these questions moving forward because political opponents may take advantage of these new concerns, as they arise, and use them for personal political advantage to the detriment of the legitimacy of American political governance. As a result, the concerns addressed in this Article regard future assessments of disability, and which factors concerning potential future vulnerability to particular diseases or impairments might warrant the determination of such disability. To be clear, these questions remain open in Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, and yet they concern important factors in deciding what constitutes sufficient disability to remove a President from office. This Article begins with an outline of some of these factors, provides two illustrative examples, and then concludes with suggestions about how to address some of the concerns