Session 2

Julia Azari is Associate Professor of Political Science at Marquette University. She holds Ph.D., M.A. and M.Phil. degrees in political science from Yale University, and a B.A. in political science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research and teaching interests include the American presidency, American political parties, the politics of the American state, and qualitative research methods. Her research has been supported by the Harry Middleton Fellowship in Presidential Studies and the Harry Truman Library Institute Scholars Award. She is a regular contributor at the political science blog The Mischiefs of Faction and her work has also appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, Politico, and FiveThirtyEight. She is cohost of the podcast Politics in Question and is author of Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate (Cornell University Press, 2014).

Mickey Edwards is a Visiting Professor and Lecturer in Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He represented Oklahoma’s fifth district in Congress from 1977 - 1993. He served in the House Republican Leadership and was a member of the Appropriations and Budget Committees. He taught for 11 years at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was the John Quincy Adams Lecturer in Legislative Practice. He has also been a visiting lecturer at the Harvard Law School and a visiting professor at Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute. He is a director of The Constitution Project, has co-chaired task forces on the war power, on judicial independence, and on the constitutional amendment process, and was a member of the American Bar Association Task Force on Presidential Signing Statements. He has been a weekly political commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered" and a weekly opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and other major newspapers. He is author or co-author of three books and is currently writing a book on American conservatism and the Constitution to be published next Spring by Oxford University Press.

Norman J. Ornstein is Senior Fellow Emeritus at American Enterprise Institute, where he has been studying politics, elections, and the U.S. Congress for more than four decades. Along with Thomas Mann and Michael Malbin, he created “Vital Statistics on Congress” in 1980, a go-to-reference guide updated every two years that provides impartial data for congressional watchers. He previously served as codirector of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project and is an adviser to the Continuity of Government Commission.. He has been involved in political reform for decades including playing a part in the creation of the Congressional Office of Compliance and the House Office of Congressional Ethics. He served as an election analyst for CBS News for thirty years, and also was an on-air election analyst for BBC News. His books include the bestsellers One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported with E. J. Dionne and Thomas E. Mann and It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism with Thomas E. Mann. Through his family foundation named in honor of his late son Matthew, he helped spearhead the documentary “The Definition of Insanity,” about criminal justice and mental illness, which premiered at the Miami Film Festival in March 2020 and aired nationally on PBS on April 14, 2020.

Dr. Karen Jackson-Weaver is the senior associate vice president of global faculty engagement and innovation advancement at NYU. She is an expert on educational policy, a historian specializing in religion, ethics, and political affairs, and a former dean-in-residence at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. Dr. Jackson-Weaver has also served as an academic dean at Princeton University as well as Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. She is currently Secretary of the Board of Trustees at the Princeton Theological Seminary. She is the former National Series Editor for the Teaching Religious Studies Series produced by Oxford University Press and the American Academy of Religion. Prior to her leadership roles in higher education, Dr. Jackson-Weaver served under three gubernatorial administrations as the executive director of the New Jersey Amistad Commission. In this role, she facilitated and led institutes throughout the country and edited two volumes of primary source documents which culminated in the publications, Reconstruction Reconsidered: The African-American Presence in American History and the Amistad Curricular Guide to American History. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Princeton University, a master’s degree at Harvard University, and a PhD in American History from Columbia University, where she was a Kluge Scholar Fellow, Merit Dissertation fellowship winner, and nominee for the university-wide teaching award.