What if most of what we think we know about reading the text of the First Amendment is just wrong? For years, the Supreme Court has treated the First Amendment like a laundry list of isolated words, stopping every once in a while to pull a couple of words out of the full text and claiming to be able to use the artificially isolated words as an infallible guide to what the First Amendment really means. In Madison's Music, Burt Neuborne argues that the Supreme Court has gotten the actual text wrong. If judges would only look at the First Amendment’s full text—all forty-five words—they would discover Madison’s music, a First Amendment that is democracy’s best friend.

America’s democracy is floundering, Congress is hopelessly gridlocked, and millions remain without gainful employment. Despite all this, longtime political strategist and polling expert Douglas E. Schoen remains optimistic. 

Democracy’s Problems And Prospects represents the best of Dr. Schoen’s distinguished career, which he has dedicated to ensuring that democratic societies reflect the consent and the will of their electorates, and that America defends its interests as well as its values.

Darryl Pinckney’s new book, Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy, is a meditation on the intersection between civil rights and the history of black participation in U.S. electoral politics. Fifty years after the first passage of the Voting Rights Act, Pinckney investigates the struggle for black voting rights from Reconstruction through the civil rights movement to Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns. Mr. Pinckney is joined by Wade Henderson, President and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and Brennan's Washington D.C. office director, Nicole Austin-Hillery.

In the last decade, national security issues have increasingly faded from the political agenda, due in part to the growth of government secrecy. In his new book, Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America's Stealth Warfare, journalist and lawyer Scott Horton explains how secrecy has fundamentally changed the way America functions. Never before have the American people had so little information concerning the wars waged in their name, nor has Congress exercised so little oversight over the war effort. Horton reminds us that publicly addressing the country’s national security concerns is the right and responsibility of a free citizenry, and ultimately, the heart of any democracy.