I first encountered the upper middle class when I attended a big magnet high school in Manhattan that attracted a decent number of brainy, better-off kids whose parents preferred not to pay private-school tuition. Growing up in an immigrant household, I’d felt largely immune to class distinctions. Before high school, some of the kids I knew were somewhat worse off, and others were somewhat better off than most, but we generally all fell into the same lower-middle- or middle-middle-class milieu. So high school was a revelation.
Billionaire energy industry brothers Charles and David Koch are planning a 2016 campaign spending blitz that would easily eclipse previous outside political efforts, with the brothers and their political network poised to spend nearly $900 million to elect conservative candidates to Congress, the presidency, and state legislatures across the country.
The last two years of Obama’s presidency will largely be defined by his defense of key legislation: the Affordable Care Act, caps on carbon emissions and Dodd-Frank. While the broad shape of the first two battles is already known, the war on financial regulation, because of its abstract nature, will often be waged outside of the public eye.
It’s been five years since the Supreme Court decided Citizens United, which allowed unlimited corporate money into the political system and increased the domination of democracy by the wealthy elite. Money has indeed overwhelmed the system since 2008.
If you're wondering why issues favored by a majority of Americans such as raising the minimum wage, gun control and net neutrality get scarcely any attention in the halls of Congress, the Citizens United case is the reason.
Five years ago this week, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court decided to allow unlimited amounts of corporate spending in political campaigns. How important was that decision? At the time, some said criticism of the decision was overblown, and that fears that it would give outsize influence to powerful interests were unfounded. Now, the evidence is in, and the results are devastating. [...]
In their seminal 1980 study on the question, using data from 1972, political scientists Raymond Wolfinger and Steven Rosenstone argued that “voters are virtually a carbon copy of the citizen population.” In 1999, Wolfinger and his colleague Benjamin Highton again came to the same conclusion: “Outcomes would not change if everyone voted.” Their argument rested upon the fact that polling data did not show large differences in opinions on most issues between those who voted and those who
Thousands of families in the United States are separated due to immigration laws that have affected hard-working immigrants who are just trying to support their families.
In the wake of increasing voter identification requirements in Texas, analyzing voter turnout is becoming critically relevant to fully comprehend political outcomes.
On November 10, 2014, the Brennan Center for Justice released a new report, Outside Spending and Dark Money in Toss-Up Senate Races: Post-election Update, which describes the rise in spending by outside groups—many of which do not publicly disclose all of their funds’ sources—in eleven competitive races. Highlights of the report include:
On a new survey which finds that hedge funds and traders of stocks and bonds are predicted to see bonuses drop by as much as 10 percent from last year.
Polling showed that 70 percent of respondents believed SDR to be necessary to protect voter participation in Montana, with 66 percent also believing that SDR protects Montana’s democracy overall.
No matter who wins each of the hundreds of elections today, one thing's for sure: a relative handful of large donors and spenders are setting the agenda and terms of debate, while the rest of us are on the sidelines.
In the wake of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, after the Aug. 9 shooting of black teenager Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson, there has been a focus on racial disparities in representation. A recent study found that while people of color make up 37.2 percent of the U.S. population, they account for only 10 percent of elected officials at the federal, state and county levels. By contrast, white men, who make up 31 percent of the population, account for 65 percent of representatives.
That Texas' discriminatory and partisan voter ID law was allowed to continue is evidence of the Supreme Court's failed understanding of its constitutional responsibilities.