stop. any more that the executive branch would want to get into? >> thank you. yes. next question? >> ramy hernandez. professor henderson, and i can't think of anything more -- or the difficulty of it than having a referendum on the president because that would just be swayed by whatever the majority wants at the time or by not having a two-thirds majority veto because that can just be swayed by whatever the congress of the at the time. and the veto by grover cleveland as an example of the president exercising his, you know, influence and having lived in california for many years i can tell you that the recall wasn't on u know, we got rid of gray davis, but the replacement was not necessarily the most successful governor.

so i'm just perturbed that they can work for the problem. >> it was eminent in the philadelphia convention because it was anti-democratic with a little "d." the most pervasive thing in the federalists is the mistrust of actual government by the governed. the philadelphiians are trying to create a government by the virtuous elite and there's much to be said to that, but it didn't make it stick, and i also think and here i betray the fact that it's very important to talk about frequency distributions and not focus on examples of ends of one which are either very commendable or very awful

and to decide -- to try to get some sense of the experience overall. a lot of states have direct democrat see and there are horrible examples of direct democracy and they may exist more frequently than in other states in california. if you look at the origins in the early 20th century and it's because of the basically accurate perception and the california legislature was bought and owned by stanford and his friends and that it was the use of very important safety valve for popular government and you can say that we have learned over the last hundred years that there are also problems with the safety valve and we could negotiate about whether it should be straight up and down majority votes and we have elected judges which is an exceptional aspect of exceptionalism and the barn

burners of the 1846 legislature and rationally supported the move to elect the judiciary because they recognized again, altogether accurately that the judges were friends of the governor which the job was to uphold whatever the governor and legislative allies wanted to do. you could say the judiciaries had their problems and so did appointed judiciaries and i'm delighted that john endorses this and it's a long overdue, national conversation about these structural details based on looking at the experience. one last point who criticized how things work in other countries, one of the reasons i so much now would emphasize the other 50 constitutions is that, you know, on occasion it might be useful to look at germany, south africa or even france, but i'm happy to, you know, accept a

bleaker notion that we look only within the united states and we still find a lot of really interesting variation that could allow us to have a meaningful discussion in the 21st century? >> your point is well taken, but i say it really hurts about what you said about leyland stanford. >> i'm leslie at stanford, and given that this is the federalist society my question is that given that the congress really hasn't done anything to resist executive power, what can a state or a group of states do to prevent executive branch inroads into state activities? >> i think that's a really interesting question. the one point i would make about the premise of the question is i actually think that congress has done a good deal to resist executive power. the best example that we can talk about is watergate and what happened immediately after

watergate. i think you can teach a whole class about the ten statutes that congress passed immediately following watergate and of course, that's not the typical thing we see from congress, and even today, i think with respect to budgeting we're living under a statutory scheme that does reflect the congressional reaction in executive power. probably john is the most famous or infamous depending on who the speakers are with regard to writing about a lot of attempts by congress in the previous administration to resist what was regarded as overreaching in the executive and that brought forth a spate of signed memos that we could certainly have argued about i think unproductively for the last hour and a half, but it does seem to me, if we have more time we can

talk about secession as the ultimate mode of resistance. my governor has flirted with that idea. >> we have the winner for the most unrealistic -- >> speaking of things that you were trying and didn't work -- >> before we congratulate our panelists i've been asked to read a very important announcement from the organizers. i've been asked to inform you about a panel that is not on the printed schedule that may be of interest. during the next period 12:45 to 2:00 p.m. the federalist society's faculty division will host a panel preparing to become a law professor. the panel be in zambrano hall room 301 that is directly above the auditorium and can be reached by taking the outside stairwell or the elevator in the

building. panelists are professors barnett, mcconnell and otis, law students and graduates considering an academic career are welcome to attend. feel free to bring your lunch up to room z 301. the panel will start no later than 1:00 and will conclude in time for the affordable care act debate. if you would join me in thanking the panelists for a lively discussion. >> it is shocking. here's a look at what's coming up today on c-span3. next journalist from "the new yorker," al jazeera and "the new york times" had an award ceremonies for investigative journalism and that's followed

by mickey ed wars on the u.s. political system and later, a hearing on racial profiling in the u.s. and with congress on break this week, we're featuring some of american history tv's weekend programs in prime time on c-span3. tonight, join us as we take a look at women's history starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern and former congresswoman pat schroeder of colorado reflects on women in politics in the 1970s. at 9:00, remembering first lady pat nixon who traveled to over 75 countries in the white house as an ambassador of good will and at 10:00 p.m. we explore the harvard relationship with women since the university's founding 375 years ago. american history tv in prime time all week on c-span3. and on c-span2 watch some of book tv's weekend program in prime time. tonight, a look at american

journalism starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern and christopher daily in his book "covering america" captures journalism and major news events. timothy gay tells the story of the war against hitler through the eyes of five reporters and they draw on post memos, correspondence, personal photographs and private interviews to trace ben bradley's 45-year career. book tv and prime time all week on c-span2. >> this is c-span3 with politics and programming throughout the week and the weekend, 48 hours of people and events telling the american story on american history tv. get our schedules and see past programs on our websites and you can join in the conversation on social media sites. >> next, the polk investigative journalism award seminar held earlier this year on long island

university in brooklyn, new york. speak include 2012 winners from "the new yorker," al jazeera and "the new york times." this is just over an hour and a half. >> my name is david steinberg and privileged to be from long island university. i'm privileged to welcome all of you to what is the beginning phase of the 63rd george polk awards. it's extraordinary that and it's gained strength and stature over the last decades. this remarkable man who was pursuing a story and was murdered because of it and then, of course, was there a complicated second half as an investigation was launched as to who killed george polk leading to some of america's most distinguished journalists participating at the very

beginning of the cold war. so we are proud and privileged to keep his memory alive and to celebrate him and this evening's activity, i think we started, ralph and i were discussing whether it was 21 or 20 years ago. i think i may have said 20 years last year and i'll say 21 now and it's certainly in that universe and what we suddenly realized was that at a lunch which will take place tomorrow where everyone is allowed, i think, a minute and a half to speak and some obey and some don't. there is a sense of rush and so we decided that we would create a seminar for students, for members of the working press and others who are interested in the topic, to invite a cluster of topics several of the award

winners to have a chance to talk about what they did, why they did it, hand as a result of what they did and this has grown and grown handsomely, and i mentioned to ralph this is the campus-based part of the program. we have students throughout the room and hopefully they themselves will take heed for you good people and go and do stuff of the sort that you have done. ralph just received the award for the crassnoff award for life achievement and his most recent book was "friendly vision." we have a major program in journalism. we are very proud of it and it is separate from the polk award, but integrally intertwined. i welcome you. i am thrilled that you're here and it is now my privilege to introduce the curator of the

polk awards, a man of -- himself, extraordinary achievement holding two polks and a pulitzer, and i think every job that "the new york times" published along the way, is that correct? you have been editor of literally every section known to humanity over the years. including some that didn't succeed ask that is another discussion for another time. ladies and gentlemen, let me turn the program over to our good friend john darden. thank you. thank you very much, dr. steinberg and welcome to you all. this is -- at this seminar, the title is getting the ungettable story. first, i'd like to thank the center for communications for their support. a few individual people in the audience especially harvey simpson who is here who is a very passionate about investigative reporting and has

been a donor to the polk program. ralph angleman, my colleague. who shares more than half the burden of it. some judges are here, and i see sprinkled throughout the audience. we have our lifetime award winner, ronny duggar in the audience. the executive director of al jazeera english has flown over, john blair who is here somewhere and i'm forgetting some people, so, please, forgive me for that. now as most reporters can tell you some stories are just simply hard to get, and they may be hard to get because the very institution they're covering is premised on secrecy or they may be hard to get because, let's say, you're covering the crackdown of an authoritarian government and it wants to keep

your footage off the air or it may be hard to get because you're a war correspondent in the middle of libya or afghanistan and as churchill remarked i think he said the truth is so precious she must be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies. how to penetrate that bodyguard and finally, what if you've come up with a wonderful scandal, a horrible scandal that it involves people who are so revered and people they don't want to pay attention to. you'll be talking about these and other case histories and today we have a very strong panel and let me introduce them to get the discussion going. to my left is jane mayer. jane is simply put, one of the country's most preeminent and investigative reporters. for the past 17 years, she's been on the staff of "the new

yorker" specializing in politics and especially lately, national security and jane went to fieldston right here in new york and studied at oxford and decided to go straight and began working for small, weekly newspapers in vermont, and worked for 12 years at "the wall street journal" who was the up front war correspondent and she's been a war correspondent and foreign correspondent. somewhere along the way she found time to co-author two books. one on the nomination of clarence thomas to the supreme court. feel free to ask her any supreme court questions later tonight. the other on ronald reagan's success term. at "the new yorker" as most of you know, she is known for exposing a wide range of nefarious u.s. practices in connection with the war on terror, questions about torture,

detention at guantanamo, the so-called extraordinary rendition flights, flights to countries that torture people. the search in the cia and the top level of administration for legal justification for what president obama used to call enhanced interrogation. all of these things and more, she examined in her best selling book of 2008 entitled the dark side, the inside story of how the war on terror turned into a war on american ideals. to jane's left is may ying welsh who is journalist and filmmaker for al-jazeera english. she has worked for the television news agency off and on since about 2003, i think it is. she's ventured into distant and dangerous parts of the world as

a sort of one-woman hit squad. she's reported on the u.s. bombing and invasion of iraq, the rebellion in the sahara. the rebel camps and janjaweed militia in darfur, mass killings in southern sudan and insurgency in northern yemen. may comes to the profession hon of thely, meaning in san francisco where she was raised her mother, lonny ding, was a documentary filmmaker, her works among other things dealt with detention and military service of japanese-americans in world war ii. her father who is here tonight has a fascinating background, he's a labor activist, a retired postal worker and at one point was a reporter for "ramparts" magazine. may studied classical arabic at

berkeley and later at the american university in cairo. she's worked out of cnn's rome bureau and also their beijing bureau as a freelance editor and cameraman covering everything, the seizure of grozny and chechnya, the 1999 earthquake in turkey and the nato bombing of belgrade. to her left is c.j.chivers of "the new york times." he is the war correspondent's war correspondent. he is known for his courage, resourcefulness on the battlefield, knowledge of tactics and strategy and finally for his expertise in weaponry, in particular the ubiquitous ak-47 of which he has written a definitive biography, a fascinating and important book

called simply "the gun." chris comes from a military family after graduating -- excuse me, i'm getting a cold. after graduating from cornell, he joined the marine corps serving in the gulf war. he was gulf war. he was honorably discharged as a captain in 1994. went to columbia graduate school of journalism, and worked at the providence journal in rhode island and joined "the times" in 1999, where he was promptly assigned to cover the cops. part of his legend at the "times" is that on 9/111, he sprinted from police headquarters to ground zero, remaining at that site day in, day out for two weeks. abroad, he has had numerous assignments including a four-year stint as a moscow

correspondent and a specialist in war zones. to chris' left is sarah ganum and at age 24, she has won acclaim about the penn state sexual abuse case involving assistant head coach jerry sandusky and staying with the story when it spiraled into a national scandal. sara was rborn in detroit and went to school in fort lauderdale, florida, and she went to school there and freelancing for the south florida "sun sentinel." she went to penn state and majored in journalism, and graduating in 2008. she worked for the centre daily times the state newspaper in

pennsylvania, and while there she began to hear rumors of sandusky's behavior, but it was not until she moved on to the crime beat at the "patriot news" out of harrisburg that she could gather enough material for an exclusive front page story in march. then a strange thing happened. not much of anything. for the most part, the story was ignored and it was not until november when she wrote about an indictment that was imminent that the outside world began to grasp the scope of the accusations against sandusky, and the university's failure to act upon them. thank you all for coming here. i apologize for my voice, and you may have to talk amongst yourselves for a while. i'd like to start with you, jane, and ask, can you tell us about the story, "the secret

sharer" involving thomas drake, a high official in the national security agency who ran into trouble? >> sure. well, if it, -- first i want to say i'm honored to be here with you guys because while you were facing life-threatening situations, when i reported on this story the only real threat was the high calories from the diners of the people i was interviewing. so i don't know if i belong here on this one. but anyway, tom drake was as you said somebody who worked inside of the nsa and the puzzle palace and the totally secret nsa, national security agency, and he had become a whistle ploeer insooi -- whistle blower and he had seen things that were wasteful inside, and we are talking about bi

billions, and he was concerned that the agency was violating civil liberties in a huge program of domestic surveillance that he understood because he was a computer expert. by the time i got to this situation, he had been charged for leaking supposedly or to a reporter at the "baltimore sun" about his concerns, and he was being charged under the espionage act with and facing the possibility of life in prison. so it is the kind of omoment that basically any reporter knows that the lawyer for this man was saying, whatever you do, don't talk to a reporter. so, and he had not talked to anybody at least not on the record. so, my mission was to see if i could somehow get him to speak to many. and he, it turned out, he was not alone. he had a small group of friends who had also become disgruntled togeth

together, and they had all been raided by the fbi at gunpoint in the most incredible circumstances, and were all certain that they were being spied on by the nsa among others, and that all of the e-mail was being audit ed or looked at, and they were afraid to make phone calls, and so i felt like i was dealing with a group of paranoids, only the kind that as kiskisinger said e paranoids have enemies and these guys really had enemies. so one of the puzzles was for me how to figure out how to communicate with him? >> and he did talk to you, and how did you do that? >> well, the truth of the story, i had help. there was somebody i had interviewed literally eight years earlier and i had stood on her doorstep and rung her doorbell and she was not home, and i left her a note who was a lawyer inside of the apartment, and she was also a

whistle-blower inside of the john walker case, and she ran a center for whistle-blowers and she worked with tom drake. the reason i was interested in this story is that by the time drake was prosecuted, obama was president, and we were supposed to be entering into a new regime with a president who had been a constitutional law professor and i was curious about whether some of the people who had been the whistle bl whistle-blowers during the bush years about abuses of government in the war on terror, and if they would have a different, and be dealt with differently under obama, and his case was a test of all of this. so, anyway. >> mei, your documentary which is chilling and you can see it all on utube and i suggest you do called "shouting in the dark." we have a segment of it here about a minute, and we will play it to give you the flavor of it.

>> bahrain, an island king dom in the arabian gulf where a majority are ruled by the sunni minority, where people fighting for democratic rights broke the barriers of fear. only to find themselves alone and crushed. this is their story. and al jazeera is their witness. the only tv journalist who remain remained to follow their journey of hope to the carnage that followed. this is the arab revolution that was abandoned by the arabs. forsaken by the west and forgotten by the world.

>> i encourage you all to seek it out on youtube. mei, how did you manage to get into bahrain and i'm told you went in on a tourist visa. how did you get the footage and what were the conditions like? >> well, at the beginning, you know, we were allowed to come into bahrain as tourists, and we came in and started filming and following the protests going on, and there was a revolution in full swing just like tunisia and egypt and we started to follow around the protesters and everything was normal and then the crackdown started. the crackdown came in waves. they would crack down on the protesters and then pull back and crackdown and pullback. and then at a certain point, there was a defining moment when there was the final crackdown when saudi arabia was sort of invited into bahrain by the ruling family of bahrain, and

they really did mass arrests and started arresting everyone who was ever associated with the democracy protests, and torturing them and some of them were tortured to death. when that phase of the crackdown happened, that is when it became very difficult to work in bahrain. >> how did you do it with a camera? did you hide the camera? >> in the beginning i had the camera out and was working in public in front of everybody, and then when the crackdown, the really harsh crackdown started m march 16th of last year, then we had to sort of start putting my camera in a feminine purse and go around wearing a hajab and i want to recognize my colleague in the audience tonight who is a bahrainian journalist. >> will you stand up? >> hasan risked his life and freedom to work on this film.