David Callahan, a senior fellow at the think tank Demos, contends the tax code should differentiate between charities and overtly partisan advocacy organizations. Now neither type of group must reveal the names of its supporters.
"It's unbelievable, probably half the states in the country have bills in play and more than a dozen are seriously in the pipeline," Tova Wang of the left-leaning think tank Demos told TPM in an interview. "It's really unprecedented in terms of geographic scope. I've never seen anything like it certainly since I've been working on voting rights issues that voter suppression bills would be introduced in so many places at the same time."
Among the other states taking up the issue are Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas and Ohio. In all four of those states, Republicans advanced their Voter ID bills last week. Those states look to join the eight states that require photo ID and the 19 that require some form of ID, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The state attorney general wants federal regulators to take enforcement action against the Indian Point nuclear plant for what he called the company's failure to comply with fire safety requirements.
"In the wake of Japan's crisis, our country's nuclear facilities should be bolstering their safety measures, yet Indian Point is looking to weaken its precautionary measures," Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said Monday.
The debate on voter ID is a clash between some people, many of them conservatives, who believe more restrictions are needed on voting and registration to rein in fraud, and others who think the process needs to be opened up to more voters, according to Miles Rapoport, who as secretary of state for Connecticut from 1995 to 1999 oversaw that state's election process.
Long lines, challenged ballots and two of the closest presidential elections in the country's history have touched off a landslide of propo
Steve Carbo, of the Democracy Project, a New York-based advocacy group that pushed for broader voter registration, said Iowa did far better than many states in implementing the provision.
Voter registration among the disabled and elderly in Iowa increased eight-fold between the 2000 and 2004 elections, Secretary of State Chet Culver said Wednesday.
Demos, a non-partisan election reform group, said higher voter turnout, especially among youth, reversed a decades-old trend of low electoral participation. The group said about 120 million voted in the Nov. 2 election, an increase of 15 million voters from 2000.
Election Day registration, or EDR, makes it possible for new voters, the recently relocated and those whose registrations were incomplete or lost, to participate without unnecessary hurdles, the group said.
ALBANY — Cleanup of hard-hit areas in New York from Tropical Storm Irene is expected to take months because roads and bridges have to be rebuilt, farms restored and infrastructure reconstructed.
While experts say the flooding was impossible to prevent, the storm that ravaged upstate wasn't initially expected because most of the original focus was on New York City and its suburbs, which ultimately didn't get hit as badly as rural areas.
Sen.
Today, the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary passed, on a party-line vote, one of the most sweeping attacks in decades on government protections.
The Rules from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) bill would require that any major regulatory rule issued by a federal agency be affirmed by a majority vote in both the House and Senate. The vote would have to take place within 70 days.
Occupy Wall Street has, in the words of John Paul Rollert, “come to embody a common sense that something is wrong with American capitalism.” The problem Rollert points to is not with capitalism itself, but with a particular American version that has ceased to work for broad cross-sections of its population. Given America’s Depression-level income inequality and near-record levels of public and private indebtedness, it is extremely tempting to focus on bad outcomes as the problem.
The Montana Supreme Court in Helena stands just off the main drag, dramatically called Last Chance Gulch Street. The picturesque setting is fitting for an institution that has just challenged the U.S. Supreme Court to a legal showdown on the enormously important question of whether corporations should have an unfettered right to dominate elections or whether citizens have the right to adopt commonsense protections to defend democratic government from corruption. Get the kids off the streets, because this could be an epic confrontation.
The mortgage servicing deal reached today between a coalition of state attorneys general and five major Wall Street banks is an important stepping stone in the effort to secure justice for homeowners victimized by the fraud and abuse behind the foreclosure crisis.
The difference is obvious, Potter replied. Because 527 groups were legally shady, they attracted far less money from fewer donors. True, the FEC didn’t enforce the law, but donors couldn’t be sure that would be the case, and some were unwilling to take the risk.
The U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision unleashed the specter of unlimited corporate political donations in U.S. elections. So far, however, it's mostly rich individuals doing the donating.
One of the effects of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision is that it allowed corporations to give unlimited amounts to independent expenditure political action committees capable of supporting or opposing political candidates.
But a new report from the non-profit group Demos shows that the majority, 55.6 percent, of donations to super PACs in 2010 and 2011 still came from individuals rather than for-profit entities.