Friends and foes of Neil Gorsuch lobbied the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday both for and against confirmation of the Colorado-based judge to the Supreme Court.
Heather McGhee, president of Demos, a liberal policy think tank, lambasted Gorsuch for not distancing himself from the court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which struck down limits on campaign contributions.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) confronted Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch about the vicious cycle facing our democracy: of severe concentration of economic power yielding severe concentration of political power.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) confronted Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch about the vicious cycle facing our democracy: of severe concentration of economic power yielding severe concentration of political power.
Today the Election Law Journal published Beyond Corruption, a peer-reviewed symposium on money in politics and the Supreme Court. The symposium was guest-edited by Professor David Schultz and contains pieces by several Demos attorneys, including a Foreword by Demos President Heather McGhee.
We’ve created our own bracket here, matching up colleges not by the number of McDonald’s High School All-Americans on their roster, but by whether or not they provide access to an affordable education and whether they are engines of upward mobility for working-class students.
“There are approximately zero students that would see a net benefit if this budget were enacted into law,” said Mark Huelsman, senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. [...]
“Consolidating or reforming campus-based aid programs is not a bad idea, but at the end of the day students have to come out ahead,” Huelsman said. “Indiscriminate cuts to work-study absolutely would harm the low income students or middle class students on campuses who absolutely do receive the money.”
The remarkable advance of same-day registration was not an accident. National organizations, including Demos and Common Cause, and numerous state organizations led the fights in legislatures around the country.
Democratic lawmakers and liberal interest groups are intensifying their pressure on senators to probe Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch’s views on campaign finance law during his confirmation hearings next week. [...]
More than 90 percent of voters (including 91 percent of Trump voters) say that it is important for Trump to nominate a Supreme Court justice open to limiting big money in politics.
Published by public policy organization Demos,Court Cash: 2016 Election Money Resulting Directly from Supreme Court Rulingsquantifies for the first time the direct impact of the Supreme Court's four most significant money-in-politics cases, using the highly competitive presidential race, as well as the 22 congressional races won by 5 percentage points or fewer, as the study's focal point. [...]
[...] In short, our analysis indicates that Donald Trump successfully leveraged existing resentment towards African Americans in combination with emerging fears of increased racial diversity in America to reshape the presidential electorate, strongly attracting nativists towards Trump and pushing some more affluent and highly educated people with more cosmopolitan views to support Hillary Clinton. Racial identity and attitudes have further displaced class as the central battleground of American politics. [...]
1. Do you agree that wealthy donors translating their massive economic power directly into political influence is a problem that should be taken into account when considering rules governing spending on elections?
[...] Judge Gorsuch’s approach “has created a system in which single individuals and corporations can spend tens of millions of dollars to influence elections, and in which candidates and elected officials are significantly more responsive to the priorities of an elite donor class than to Americans on the whole,” the CLC said.76 A recent report from Demos found that the ove
The Senate voted Monday to kill an Obama administration rule aimed at curbing labor violations among government contractors. Two years in the making, the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule was targeted by Republican lawmakers 10 days after Donald Trump’s inauguration. The House voted to excise it on Feb.
A new report from the public policy think tank Demos and the Institute on Assets and Social Policy (IASP) at Brandeis University found that often, the go-to solutions cited to address economic inequality, do not close the wealth gap between whites and blacks and Latinos.
In a letter sent Tuesday to the New York State Board of Elections and DMV, the groups accused the DMV of flouting a federal law requiring that citizens be able to register to vote whenever they apply for, renew, or change their address on a driver's license or state-issued identification card.[...]
Congressional Republicans and the Trump administration apparently believe that extremely basic workplace protections are too onerous to ask U.S. businesses to uphold.
President Trump called last night for “one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history.” He has proposed increasing the military budget by $54 billion—a proposal that would require great sacrifice from working people in the form of cuts to vital health care, education and environmental services.
You can be sure that communities are fighting back against the far-reaching, multi-headed, xenophobic and draconian first wave of Trump’s immigration enforcement apparatus. Everyone who believes in equality and justice can assist in this community-led battle for the soul of our democracy.