Chapter 1 Exercises

Open American Government Project

Chapter 1 Exercises

These exercises are designed to be done in sequence, but you can work them in any order if you have a specific learning goal. Most exercises require basic internet access; none require subscriptions. Total time for all exercises: approximately 4 to 5 hours, distributed across the first two weeks of the semester.

A note on grading: in courses using this textbook, instructors typically assign Exercises 1, 5, and 8 as required (they are the foundation of the Democracy Audit) and select two or three of the others as additional graded work. Self-study readers are encouraged to do all eight.

Exercise 1: Find Your Representative (Required for the Democracy Audit)

Time: 20 minutes.

Instructions:

Visit https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative.
Enter your home Zip+4 code. (If you do not know the +4 portion, look it up at https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm.)
Record the following: - Your congressional district (e.g., "Texas 21" or "Pennsylvania 7"). - The full name of your current U.S. House Representative. - Their party affiliation. - The year they first took office in this seat. - Their official House.gov URL.
From their House.gov page, click "Biography" or "Committees" and record their committee and subcommittee assignments.
From the same page or from the Office of the Clerk's website, find their district office address and one Washington office phone number.

Expected output: A six-line entry in your my-democracy-audit.md file with all five items, formatted as instructed in Section 1.6 of the chapter.

Hint: If your House.gov entry does not list committee assignments (some members update their pages slowly after committee shuffles), check the official Committee on House Administration roster at https://cha.house.gov or the relevant committee's website.

Worked example: A reader living in Asheville, North Carolina, entering the zip code 28801, would find that they are in North Carolina's 11th Congressional District, currently represented by Chuck Edwards (R, first elected 2022). His committee assignments include the House Committee on Appropriations and the House Committee on Education and Workforce. His district office is at 200 N. Grove Street, Suite 90, Hendersonville, NC. (Verify against current House.gov data, which is the authoritative source.)

Exercise 2: Find Your Senators

Time: 10 minutes.

Instructions:

Visit https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm.
Select your state from the dropdown menu.
Record the following for each of your two senators: - Full name. - Party affiliation. - Year first elected. - Year their current term ends. - Major committee assignments.
From each senator's official Senate.gov page, find their state office address closest to where you live.

Expected output: A two-entry block in your my-democracy-audit.md file. Note the staggering of Senate terms: of any state's two senators, one's term will be ending sooner than the other's. Both senators represent the same state but may have very different political profiles.

Hint: Note whether your senators are from the same party or different parties. As of the 119th Congress (2025–2027), only six states have split-party Senate delegations — about half as many as a generation ago. This is a data point you will return to in Chapter 17 (Political Parties) when discussing partisan sorting.

Exercise 3: Find Your State Legislative District

Time: 15 minutes.

Instructions:

Visit https://openstates.org and enter your home address (or, if you prefer not to share your address, the address of a nearby public landmark in your district).
Record: - Your state House district number. - Your state Senate district number. - The names and parties of your state-level representatives.
For one of these state legislators, click through to their OpenStates profile and find one bill they sponsored in the most recent legislative session. Note the bill number, title, and current status.

Expected output: A four-line entry in your my-democracy-audit.md under a "State" subheading.

Hint: Most state legislators have substantially less name recognition than their federal counterparts but a significantly larger direct effect on your daily life — they vote on state taxes, K–12 education funding, transportation projects, criminal sentencing, and most of the laws regulating professional licensing, business permitting, and civil litigation in your state.

Exercise 4: Read One Provision of the Constitution and Translate It

Time: 30 minutes.

Instructions:

Read the full text of Article I, Section 8, Clauses 1 through 18 of the U.S. Constitution. (Free authoritative text: https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-1/.)
Pick any one clause that interests you. (Common choices: the Commerce Clause, Clause 3; the Necessary and Proper Clause, Clause 18; the Bankruptcy Clause, Clause 4.)
Write a 100–150-word plain-English translation of what the clause says — what powers it grants Congress, in language a high-school freshman could understand.
Then write a separate 100–150-word paragraph on what contested readings of this clause exist. (Most major Article I, Section 8 clauses have a literature of competing readings; the Commerce Clause alone has spawned a book-length scholarly debate.)

Expected output: A 200–300-word document with a clause citation and two paragraphs.

Hint: Constitution Annotated (https://constitution.congress.gov) is the official Library of Congress resource summarizing the major Supreme Court cases interpreting each clause. Use it for the second paragraph, but keep your translation in your own words.

Answer-key sketch (for the Commerce Clause, Article I, Section 8, Clause 3):

Plain-English translation: This clause says that Congress has the power to regulate commerce — buying, selling, transporting, and trading — between the United States and other countries, between the states, and between Native American tribes and the rest of the country. It does not say what counts as "commerce" or how far the regulation can reach.

Contested readings: The 19th-century Supreme Court read the clause narrowly, allowing federal regulation of crossing-state-lines commerce but not regulation of activity that took place within a single state, even if it ultimately affected interstate trade. After 1937, the Court read the clause much more broadly, upholding federal regulations of agricultural production (Wickard v. Filburn, 1942) and civil-rights laws (Heart of Atlanta Motel, 1964) on the theory that local activities, in aggregate, affect interstate commerce. Beginning with United States v. Lopez (1995) and continuing through NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), the Court has signaled a willingness to enforce some outer limits on the Commerce Clause again. The current Roberts Court is widely expected to continue this narrowing trend, though the scope of the trend is genuinely contested among scholars.

Exercise 5: Read One Provision of the Constitution and Translate It (Bill of Rights edition)

Time: 25 minutes.

Instructions:

Read the full text of any one of the first ten amendments (the Bill of Rights). For Chapter 1 purposes, the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, or Tenth Amendments are all good choices.
Write a 100–150-word plain-English translation of the amendment.
Identify one contemporary policy debate (post-2020) where this amendment is at the center. Write 75–100 words on what each side argues.

Expected output: A 200–300-word document with the amendment text quoted, a translation, and a policy-debate summary that steel-mans both sides.

Hint: Use the Balance Guide's Rule 1 (steel-man, never straw-man) when summarizing the policy debate. If your summary makes one side sound foolish, you have not done the exercise correctly. Examples of contemporary debates aligned to specific amendments: First (campus speech, social-media regulation, religious accommodation); Second (post-Bruen gun-regulation challenges); Fourth (border-search exceptions, digital-device searches at customs); Tenth (state-versus-federal authority on issues from marijuana to immigration enforcement).

Exercise 6: Steel-Man the Position You Disagree With

Time: 45 minutes.

Instructions:

Pick one of these contested policy questions: - Should the U.S. Senate eliminate the legislative filibuster? - Should the federal government play a larger role in K–12 education funding and standards? - Should Congress establish a federal voter-ID requirement for federal elections? - Should the federal government expand or contract the regulatory authority of the EPA? - Should the U.S. Constitution be amended to abolish the Electoral College?
Identify which side you currently believe is correct.
Write 400–500 words defending the opposite position as it would be defended by its smartest, most reasonable adherents. You must not strawman. You must cite at least one serious thinker, scholar, or political figure who holds that position. You must use that side's actual terminology, not pejorative substitutes for it.
Then, in a closing 100-word paragraph, explain what (if anything) the steel-man exercise made you reconsider. It is acceptable to conclude that your original position is still correct; it is not acceptable to conclude that the other side has no honest defenders.

Expected output: A 500–600-word document.

Hint: This exercise is the foundation of every other "steel-man" exercise in the book. It is also typically the exercise students find most uncomfortable. If you are not uncomfortable, you are probably not steel-manning hard enough. Resources for steel-manning specific positions: for a steel-manned conservative case, see National Review and Yuval Levin's A Time to Build. For a steel-manned progressive case, see The Atlantic and Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized. For libertarian framings, see Reason and the Cato Institute's policy analyses. For social-democratic framings, see Dissent and the American Prospect.

Exercise 7: Steel-Man — A Charged Topic

Time: 45 minutes.

Instructions:

Pick a position you find personally difficult to engage charitably. Then write 400 words steel-manning it. The catch: do this for a position different from the one you chose in Exercise 6. The book will return to this skill repeatedly; the more practice now, the easier it gets.

Exercise 8: Analyze the Civic-Knowledge Data (Required for the Democracy Audit)

Time: 30 minutes.

Instructions:

Visit the Annenberg Public Policy Center's Constitution Day Civics Survey results page (https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org) and find the most recent annual report.
Identify three of the questions asked in the most recent survey, and the percentage of respondents who answered each correctly.
Take each of those three questions yourself, before reading the answer. Record whether you got each right.
Compare your performance to the national average. Are you above, below, or at the average? Are there particular topics where you scored well or poorly?
Write a 150–200-word reflection: what does the data suggest about (a) where most Americans' civic knowledge has gaps, and (b) where your own gaps are? What chapters of this book do you expect to find most useful for filling them?

Expected output: A 150–200-word reflection. Add it to your my-democracy-audit.md file as the first "audit observation" entry.

Hint: The Annenberg survey is the most rigorous civic-knowledge survey in the United States. If you find a question where you scored differently from the national average, that is a signal — either of your strengths or of where the country differs from you. Both directions are interesting.

Exercise 9: Democracy Audit Setup (Required)

Time: 30 minutes.

Instructions:

You should now have, from Exercises 1 through 5, the following information in my-democracy-audit.md:

Your congressional district and U.S. Representative.
Your two U.S. Senators.
Your state legislative district(s) and state legislators.
One state-level bill from your state legislator's record.
One reflection on the Annenberg civic-knowledge data.

Add to your file:

A Discovery Log subsection where, for each chapter from now through the end of the semester, you will add 1–3 sentences on what you learned about your district through that chapter's lens. (Most chapters of this textbook end with a "Your District" callout that prompts a specific Audit task.)
A Questions for Later subsection where you note things you wonder about your district that you do not yet know how to answer. (Example: "How was my district drawn after the 2020 Census? Was it competitive before? Why does my representative serve on the committees they serve on?")
A Final Audit Outline subsection — leave it blank for now. By Chapter 39, you will fill this in with the structure of your final 25-to-35-page profile.

Expected output: A my-democracy-audit.md file with all of the above structure populated, ready to be added to in every subsequent chapter.

Hint: Treat this file as a living document. Add to it weekly. If your instructor is grading the Democracy Audit, they will likely check it at midterm, at the end of each part, and as a final deliverable. Even self-study readers should plan to revisit it after every chapter — the cumulative value compounds.

A Note on Difficulty

Exercises 1, 2, 3, 8, and 9 are straightforward; do not skip them, but do not overthink them. Exercises 4, 5, 6, and 7 are where the real intellectual work begins, and they will get more challenging as the book progresses. If steel-manning feels uncomfortable now, that is the correct feeling. The discipline is one of the most useful things this book will teach you.

If you finish all nine exercises in this chapter, you have done about 4 hours of work. Spread across two weeks (the time most courses spend on a single chapter), that is reasonable; spread across one weekend, it is heavy. Pace yourself.