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This course compares the way Washington makes national security policy today with the very different arrangements for foreign policy, war-making and democratic accountability envisioned in the United States Constitution. The course is designed to provide students with a firm grounding in the Constitutional debates and phraseology defining the carefully balanced powers of the Presidency and the Congress and the safeguards meant to protect civil liberties in wartime. The course tracks the development of a security state mentality in the years since the Second World War and illustrates how this has radically changed America’s view of its constitutional democracy, its global military role and its place in the international economy. Twenty-five years after the end of the cold war, presidential war powers and federal government spying on US citizens are again the subject of lively debate. The rise of an intermittently libertarian and constitutional Tea Party caucus in Congress, fiscal pressures on the Pentagon budget, the documents disclosed by Bradley/Chelsea Manning and the labor market upheavals caused by globalization and the Great Recession have all helped fuel this debate . The course will include, but not be limited to, analyses and arguments drawn from Prof. Unger’s book, The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of National Security At All Costs, published by Penguin in 2012 (paperback 2013).