Over the past week, the governor of the Lone Star state has threatened to have a number of legislators arrested and brought to the state house to vote on a bill that they left the state to protest. What made such drastic measures necessary, and why are Texas Democrats still fighting?
This past Monday, a majority of Texas House Democrats left the state on chartered planes to Dulles Airport in Washington in an effort to block the state’s Republicans from passing a new restrictive voting law. …
While ranked-choice voting has already been used in a number of municipalities and the state of Maine, it’s still a relatively untested system. This past week, however, it was tested in a new and much larger district: New York City.
After dealing with an accidental vote release, a number of nationally recognizable candidates, and attention from around the country, New York’s Democratic primary election, and likely its ultimate winner, was finally decided: Eric Adams, the Brooklyn Borough President, was chosen as the nominee.
What makes this election unique isn’t so much the candidates or the attention it received: it’s the way the candidates were elected. Ranked-choice voting (RCV) is slowly seeping its way into our modern election system.
So, New York’s Democratic Party tried it out, and despite the number of snafus…
Donald Trump’s biggest legacy hasn’t been in law, policy, or bureaucracy, despite all the changes he made through those avenues: it’s the three justices he appointed to give the conservatives a supermajority on the high court.
Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court has gone through a major change. After the Obama years, Donald Trump’s three appointed justices forced the conservatives into a supermajority, holding vast implications for cases concerning ObamaCare, abortion rights, voting rights, and other hot-button issues.
Attack on the Voting Rights Act
Since Roberts became chief justice, one of his main goals was to seek a restraint on government regulation in the…
This past week, Republicans blocked debate on a bill that would have revamped America’s election system, through which Democrats intended to enforce voting rights to a large number of Americans.
The vote, intended to bring debate to the floor, failed the 60-vote requirement with a party line 50–50 vote.
While this bill was by no means expected to pass, given the widespread GOP opposition to it, there was some hope among the liberal ranks that some GOP senators would go against the party leadership. However, many Republicans have long held that the bill, which allowed a guaranteed early voting, no-excuse mail voting, and automatic voter registration, is an overstep of federal authority.
During the past year, over 18 states have passed voter restriction laws in the form of fraud protection…
According to a recent Ispos poll, a majority of Republicans somewhat or strongly disapprove of Joe Biden’s performance thus far. It’s not really that unexpected: Republicans will always be unhappy with a Democrat in charge, just as they were with Barack Obama just a decade ago. But something’s a little bit different now.
Since the beginning of twenty-first century, political polarization has been rampant: both policies and politicians have been shifting further and further to their ideological extremes. That’s not news. …
In a continuation of their allegiance to former President Donald Trump, House Republicans voted Liz Cheney (R-WY), an outspoken critic of the former party leader, out of her post as the third-ranking Republican in the House.
As one of ten Republicans to vote to impeach Donald Trump after the January 6th attack on the Capitol and to refuse Trump’s version of the falsified election last November, Liz Cheney hasn’t been afraid to stick it to the party leaders. …
Despite the United States’ sweeping vaccine distribution that has thus far inoculated over a quarter of all Americans, the Biden administration faces a cultural problem that is likely to hinder its ability to facilitate a return to normalcy: vaccine hesitancy.
This past Saturday, I received my Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. I registered online just one day before, walked into CVS pharmacy, and came out with my vaccine card. Simple and easy.
While my situation, well inside upper middle-class suburbia, may not be representative of the broad population, it’s a sign: vaccines are becoming widely available. But before we can reach any…
Joe Biden, since coming into office, has maintained a relatively high approval rating, hovering just above fifty percent, not uncommon for a newly minted president. But we must remember that over the past six or so years, polling has vastly underestimated Republican representation in the electorate. What does that mean for a couple of years down the line?
As we look forward to the major statewide elections in 2021, it looks as if Democrats are expecting minor challenges in the gubernatorial races in Virginia, New Jersey, and (likely) California. …
Since Donald Trump’s unsuccessful attempts to overcome last year’s election results, Republicans have made it their mission to improve the legitimacy of our democratic process. But it’s quite clear that Georgia’s new election voting laws do quite the opposite.
Since before last year’s election, Republicans have been on a mission to limit voting by means of reducing access to mail-in ballots, decreasing the number of precincts (notably in low-income and minority areas), and making voter identification mandatory. Donald Trump’s attack on the legitimacy of our election process further invited Republicans to do just that, Georgia’s new legislation putting that mission into action.
Americans mostly remain opposed to voter restrictions. Probably for good reason, therefore, Governor Brian Kemp’s new legislation has drawn condemnation from Democrats and a number of large organizations, including Major League Baseball. …
As vaccines continue to rollout and nearly twenty percent of people of in the United States get at least their first shot, one question is on a lot of people’s minds: what can you do once you get the vaccine?
The past year has been a crash course of public health terms and pandemic etiquette. Social Distancing. Masks. Vaccines. Safety and Efficacy. Pfizer. Moderna. Zoom. All these words were meaningless just last year. Now, they’re part of our daily vocabulary.
But as this decade-long period hopefully comes to an end, we have to look forward to how long it will…
Yash Rajpal
Teen writer. Plain and simple.
