Word: faction
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With elections for Council officers coming up this weekend, some Council members are trying to manipulate the popular appeal of the issue of divestment to undermine the re-election bids of the present leadership. Members of a Council political faction, who are trying to unseat the incumbent Council officers, have said that they will use the results of the second part of the referendum as a vote of confidence in the Council's current leadership...
...faction I understand a number of citizens...who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse...to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." James Madison in The Federalist...
...GROUPS IN American politics today come closer to Madison's definition of "faction" than political action committees (PACs). Created as a result of a federal election law reform, PACs have steadily--and ironically--mushroomed into a powerful tool for influencing legislation. And as the PACs have grown, so too have the number of congressmen who know how to transform skillfully the groups' ready and generous campaign contributions into repeated electoral victories...
...mayor, who was sworn in and began his term immediately after the vote, is a member of the conservative Independent faction of the council. Sullivan became mayor for the third time in his career--50 years to the day after his late father, Michael, took the oath of office as the council's chairman...
...politicizing the law does not mean adding new radical elements, but rather drawing out into the open what is already there. Conservatives charge that the CLS faction of the Law School faculty has "manipulated" the tenure process to hire more left faculty members. But how can anybody claim that CLS proponents have perverted something for which there is no objective norm, something that is already a debate and a political process? The reasonableness of the tenure process--likewise of the "science" of legal analysis which presumes to logically deduce the one right answer to legal questions--only enshrines existing power...