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In Praise of Deadlock: How Partisan Struggle Makes Better Laws

In Praise of Deadlock: How Partisan Struggle Makes Better Laws by W. Lee Rawls

Publisher

Woodrow Wilson Center Press with Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009

ISBN

978-0-8018-9404-6 hardcover; 978-0-8018-9403-9 paperback
In Praise of Deadlock: How Partisan Struggle Makes Better Laws by W. Lee Rawls
Price
$40.00 hardcover; $20.00 paperback
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With budget reconciliations, filibusters, and supermajorities making headlines, In Praise of Deadlock explains the legislative process and its checkpoints, while maintaining a noncomformist respect for the hurdles and hang-ups inherent in the American system. As a practitioner who served for fourteen years as chief of staff to Senators Bill Frist and Pete Domenici, W. Lee Rawls offers a candid perspective on partisan struggle, which he sees as essential to advancing new policy and generating consensus. Such grappling, Rawls concludes, results in a nuanced, durable machine, producing better laws that have benefited from minority input.

W. Lee Rawls, who died in 2010, was chief of staff to the director of the FBI and an adjunct professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Public Policy at the College of William and Mary. He was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in 2007.

A book launch event for In Praise of Deadlock was held on October 19, 2009, at the Wilson Center.

About the Author

W. Lee Rawls

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