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Voting for voter suppression: Why Republicans are unwilling to support common-sense Voting Rights

Voting for voter suppression: Why Republicans are unwilling to support common-sense Voting Rights

Posted by | Jan 14, 2022

The struggle between the Trump-backed forces of authoritarianism and those of us defending democracy is coming down to the fight over whether the Democrats can get the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act through the Senate. It is worth reading what is actually in the bills because, to my mind, it is bananas that they are in any way controversial. The Freedom to Vote Act is a trimmed version of the For the People Act the House passed at the beginning of this congressional session. It establishes a baseline for access to the ballot...

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Political Panic: Libraries across America report surge of coordinated attempts to ban books in schools

Political Panic: Libraries across America report surge of coordinated attempts to ban books in schools

Posted by | Jan 13, 2022

From calls in Virginia to burn “sexually explicit” books in a school library to a wave of challenges to titles by authors ranging from Toni Morrison to Alison Bechdel, the American Library Association is charting an unprecedented rise in attempts to ban books in libraries, many of which it believes are fueled by organized conservative campaigns. “It’s a volume of challenges I’ve never seen in my time at the ALA – the last 20 years. We’ve never had a time when we’ve gotten four or five reports a day for days on end, sometimes as many as eight in...

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Guarantee Clause: Buried in our Constitution for 232 years is an emergency mechanism to save Democracy

Guarantee Clause: Buried in our Constitution for 232 years is an emergency mechanism to save Democracy

Posted by | Jan 13, 2022

The Founders of this nation, and the Framers who wrote our Constitution, created as Ben Franklin famously said a constitutional republic: a government “deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed” through citizens’ right to vote. They referred to this as “republicanism” because it was based on the Greek and Roman republics (then thousands of years in the past but still remembered and idealized), and when put into law they called it “a Republican Form of Government.” Today that form of government in crisis in America, as that core right to vote that defines republicanism is under...

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Abandoning Democracy: A failure to pass meaningful voting rights will signal the death of our republic

Abandoning Democracy: A failure to pass meaningful voting rights will signal the death of our republic

Posted by | Jan 12, 2022

Remember when the Biden presidency was brand new and Democrats in the House and Senate proposed a sweeping, $6 trillion package to rebuild our social safety net, cut drug prices, upgrade our infrastructure, rescue our students and elderly, and save the environment? As it was moving forward, a small group of Republicans and Democrats who call themselves the “corporate problem solvers caucus,” told us that if they could just peel off the parts that involved actual physical construction of infrastructure into a separate bill, they’d get it going right away without having to worry about the filibuster. The Democrats...

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American Autocracy: 2024 will most likely see the end of our Civil Liberties if voting rights not secured

American Autocracy: 2024 will most likely see the end of our Civil Liberties if voting rights not secured

Posted by | Jan 12, 2022

One year since then-President Donald Trump and his Republican accomplices’ lies about voter fraud led to a failed coup on January 6, 2021, progressives are warning that the GOP’s ongoing, nationwide assault on the franchise will continue as long as Senate Democrats fail to pass pro-democracy legislation. “In America, voters decide the outcome of elections,” Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of Public Citizen, said in a statement. “Yet 365 days after the attacks on the 2020 election culminated in the Capitol calamity, we still haven’t enacted meaningful reforms to prevent another January 6. If the Senate doesn’t act now,...

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Knezelism