Media

Shaun McCutcheon doesn’t like that there is a cap on the total amount of money that one person is permitted to contribute to federal candidates, parties, and political-action committees. And he is hoping that, someday soon, the Supreme Court will grant his wish by striking these limits when it rules on his case, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission.

Should moral judgment be stripped out of social policy? Eduardo Porter argues yes today in the New York Times, calling for an end to the demonization of deadbeat dads -- a stance he says hasn't worked and shifts attention away from the economic reasons that low-skilled men find it so hard to be effective breadwinners these days. 

Today, Senate Republicans and Democrats voted to block President Obama's pick for Justice Department Civil Rights Division head Debo Adegbile, the former lead attorney on voting rights for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Republicans opposed him mostly because of his involvement as an LDF lawyer in the appeal for the imprisoned human rights activist Mumia Abu-Jamal. Adegbile's assistance in that case was filing a brief claiming that the jury in Abu-Jamal's trial—where he was convicted for killing a police officer—received improper instructions for their deliberations.

"No one who works full-time should have to raise their children in poverty," Senator Barbara Boxer said. She was talking about raising the minimum wage during aspeech to the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition to citing the moral reason the federal minimum wage deserves a second look, she also made an economic argument. "When working people have a little more in their paychecks, they spend a little more in their communities. So that's what we're trying to do," she added.

For higher education and student debt, this year’s budget mostly includes proposals we’ve seen from the Obama administration in previous budgets, speeches, or elsewhere.

The Detroit Emergency Manager, Kevyn Orr, has announced the third iteration of a settlement of a massive derivatives deal gone wrong, a key element of the largest municipal bankruptcy in history. On the surface, it appears to be a significant improvement over the prior versions. But appearances can be deceiving.

"Obamacare." The right loves to hammer the Affordable Care Act with this tagline, and even the rest of us tend to us it. But we should not, for the label works at least partly as a racial provocation.

The credit reporting industry has a profound and growing impact on Americans' economic lives—from whether you can rent an apartment to how much your car loan costs to whether you get hired for a job—yet the entire system falls dangerously short on basic goals of fairness and accuracy. That was the conclusion of Demos’ 2011 foundational study on credit reporting and we called for urgent reforms.

Like other progressives in the think tank arena, I've spent a lot of time envying how supportive conservative foundations and wealthy individuals have been of places like Cato and the Heritage Foundation. The huge impact of the conservative policy infrastructure stands as one of the greatest success stories of philanthropy in modern times -- with relatively small foundations like Bradley, Scaife, and Olin clearly moving the needle in key debates through their think tank investments.