U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara vowed that he has the “fearlessness and independence” needed to investigate Albany corruption as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is accused of interfering with his own corruption commission.
“If other people aren’t going to do it, then we’re going to do it,” Bharara said on the PBS’ program “Charlie Rose."
At this year’s Netroots Nation conference, where speakers included Democratic luminaries like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Vice President Joe Biden, the honor of delivering the opening keynote address went to Rev. William Barber, the president of the North Carolina NAACP and the driving force behind the state’s Moral Mondays demonstrations.
If one speech captured the tenor of this year’s Netroots Nation, it was Barber’s.
“Movements never came from D.C. down,” he bellowed. “Movements always come from Birmingham up, from Montgomery up.”
In pledging $50-million to strengthen America’s "flailing democracy," the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has stirred criticism among liberal groups that in doing so it has jettisoned some of its core values.
In its three-year "Madison Initiative," named after James Madison, an American founder who warned against the "mischiefs of faction," the foundation says it will support groups looking to make adjustments to the legislative process so Congress can perform its basic tasks like passing annual spending bills, says Daniel Stid, who will lead the effort for Hewlett.
A year after a conservative U.S. Supreme Court majority gutted the crown jewel of the civil rights movement, the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), the nation’s foremost voting rights attorneys say that racial discrimination in voting is rampant, especially in southern states where the the VRA helped to ensure access to the ballot.
From here to the Midwest, the actions of law-enforcement authorities form the big political topic of the summer of 2014.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — often labeled a tea party conservative — drew particular attention for his statements on the troubles in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting death of Michael Brown by a white police officer. He linked a “militarization of law enforcement” to a more general “erosion of civil liberties and due process.”
How bad a problem is inequality? Are working-class people getting screwed? Should we raise taxes on the rich? Is the United States, in short, a fundamentally unfair place? These are the questions that keep awake policy analysts and fuel endless dinner-party debates. But there's one group that is not losing very much sleep over them: rich folks.
Last week, Massachusetts became the latest state to either settle or lose in litigation over complaints that it wasn’t providing adequate voter registration services at welfare offices.
The settlement is part of a broad effort by voting rights groups to reverse the decline in voter registrations at public assistance offices, which Congress intended to serve as a mechanism for signing up low-income voters. National voting rights groups argue that the decline in registrations is because of improper implementation by staff at government welfare offices. (...)
On Thursday, a day on which many New Yorkers were squinting in what seemed like the first full sunlight in months, New York Mayor de Blasio announced at Gracie Mansion that he, along with a number of other leading progressives, was putting forward a vision for how to address income inequality. Speaking first, de Blasio said that the group had come together to formulate a template for how best to conquer income inequality, which, he said, is worse today than it was at the height of the Great Depression.
President Obama's recent comments on universal voting have spurred a debate about how such a policy would influence elections. On the Monkey Cage blog, John Sides examines the partisan consequences and argues that turnout would generally benefit Democrats, but that the effect would be modest.
Barring a dramatic scandal or an unforeseen event, Hillary Clinton will be the 2016 Democratic party nominee for president. While many on the left have complained about her close ties to banks and her past unwillingness to tackle inequality, such complaints are unlikely to be solved by any challenger. Progressives should instead begin creating the infrastructure to shift American politics in a more progressive direction -- and do so while supporting Clinton in 2016.
To date, the Senate has been mostly unsupportive of the Moreland Commission's proposals. The good government groups are hopeful the current wake of scandal will be enough to finally persuade lawmakers to enact real change.
"We think that should be a wakeup call now to the Senate," Scharff said.
"This is not only a political decision,” said Emmanuel Caicedo, a senior campaign strategist with Demos. “This is a moment where our leaders can make a moral and ethical choice about whose voices matter."
Local social service agencies are not giving poor residents adequate opportunities to file and update voter registrations as required by federal law, a letter sent by a group of voting rights advocates warned the North Carolina State Board of Elections and Department of Health and Human Services.
Executives with Project Vote, Demos, Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice were the lead authors of the letter, which is potentially the precursor to a lawsuit if North Carolina officials don't a
After the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, many pointed at the gap between the black population and their overwhelmingly white elected officials as a symptom of the country’s problem with race.
Demos, the New York-based group, began monitoring North Carolina about a decade ago because it spotted a drop-off in public assistance registrations. Gary Bartlett, the State Board of Elections director at the time, was eager to attract more voters, said Stuart Naifeh, an attorney with Demos.
“He was as dismayed as we were about the low rates,” Naifeh said. “He wanted to work with us to improve that.”
Voting matters. Though many Americans believe that voting is either useless or merely a civic duty, in reality it carries huge consequences for the decisions of politicians.
This is not the first time North Carolina has fallen out of compliance with the NVRA. Dēmos, the New York-based group that has put North Carolina on notice, also monitored the state about 10 years ago after seeing a drop in voter registration applications processed by public assistance agencies. Gary Bartlett, the State Board of Elections director at the time, worked closely with Dēmos to get the state back into compliance.