Chapter 3 considers the self-help of time management, productivity, and creative timeflow in conversation with the work of Tao Lin and Myriam Gurba. First, I examine Lin’s autofictional novels, especially Taipei (2013), exploring how his relationship with time management evolves through ideas of micromanaged self-control, a self-tracking ‘virtual self’, and psychedelic, aleatory, and New Age temporalities. Then, by attending to Gurba’s memoir, Mean (2017), as well as the self-help advice podcast she co-hosted, I look at how her sense of therapeutic ‘trauma time’ and queer Chicanx asynchronic time combine to produce a form of ‘writer’s block’ that challenges the notion of literary production as a rational activity. The chapter argues that both authors play with diverse self-help discourses to explore agency and control in the processes of writing and life, illuminating broader tensions in contemporary culture between ideas of writers as disciplined, entrepreneurial craftspeople or as recalcitrant, romantic artists.

So far, this book has focused on the power of the President to act. However, the President and the Executive Branch make up just one of the three branches of the federal government, Congress and the federal courts composing the other two. In this chapter we will focus on the relationship between the power of Congress to make laws and the President’s power to sign into law a bill Congress has passed, the power to veto a law, and the power to issue statements of interpretation on a bill the President signs into law.

Transplant teams often reject organs offered to their patients for a variety of reasons, including the assessment that the qualities of the organs are too low. Rejections add to cold ischemic time, which makes low-quality organs even less desirable and thus increases the risk of nonuse. Recent changes by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in the way it assesses organ procurement organizations (OPOs) and the more credible threat these changes pose to their local monopolies have incentivized the recovery of more low-quality organs. A change in the organizational report card for transplant centers has incentivized lower-volume transplant centers to reject more low-quality organs despite risk adjustment. The OPTN has developed several policies, such as offer filters, that attempt to reduce the number of organ offers transplant centers receive that they are unlikely to accept. The increasing rates of organ nonuse and the recognition that continuous distribution (CD) could help address it or make it worse led to the Expeditious Task Force and the postponement of the finalization of CD proposals for kidneys and pancreases.

Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution empowers the President to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” The seemingly simple language of this clause in the Constitution obscures a number of complicated questions about the scope and nature of this presidential power. For example – may Congress play a role in a president’s decision on pardons? Can the President grant a pardon for both state and federal crimes? Is the President required to fully pardon someone, or may he place conditions on the pardon? And, can a president pardon himself?

It’s one thing to say a sitting president can be civilly sued for personal capacity conduct, as the Court held in Clinton v. Jones. It’s quite another to say that a sitting president can be indicted for a crime. Or are they so different? The courts have never addressed this question. The Department of Justice (DOJ) in three Office of Legal Counsel memos (1974, 2000, and 2019) answered in the negative. Other lawyers and legal scholars disagree.

In addition to the more debated presidential powers discussed in the previous chapters of this book, the President can also exercise several less controversial powers. Among these powers are the power to seek the opinions of executive officers, the power to appoint ambassadors, federal judges, and other officers of the United States, and the right to provide Congress information on the state of the union.

When considering presidential power, presidential “ethics” concerns also are relevant. Here we address two aspects of this problem – financial and political conflicts of interest of the President.

Corruption is an ancient problem. Edmund Burke, as a member of the English Parliament, denounced the corrupt influence on government by corporations, particularly the East India Company. After the 1773 Tea Act granted that company a monopoly on sale of tea in America, colonists dumped their tea into the Boston harbor, an event that became known as the Boston Tea Party. Americans in the past and now are deeply concerned with being governed by money.

The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) began as the network administrative organization (NAO) overseeing the voluntary sharing of organs among transplant centers. It subsequently became the administrator of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN), which Congress created to allocate deceased-donor organs when it nationalized them in 1984. The OPTN continuously makes incremental changes to organ allocation rules, raising concerns that the path dependence of allocation rules would hinder more radical change. Under pressure from the federal government, the OPTN gradually reduced the role of geographic boundaries in its allocation rules. However, it also introduced other categories so that allocation rules became increasingly complex. It initially considered continuous distribution (CD), a radical change, as an alternative for eliminating historical geographic boundaries. The OPTN subsequently committed to implementing CD for all solid organs because it offered improvements in efficiency, equity, and transparency, and because its relative simplicity would allow more expeditious incremental changes to allocation rules.