By Jenna Lewinstein (SC ’19) With the 2018 midterm elections on the horizon, speculation have arose as to whether or not the Democrats will take back Congress. In the event of a Democratic majority in either chamber, climate change would top a list of legislative priorities, simply for its increasing relevance yet lack of prevalence in the 113th Congress. In Congress, environmental and...
By Elinor Aspegren (PZ ’20) Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court John Paul Stevens published an op-ed in the New York Times on March 27, 2018, arguing for the repeal of the Second Amendment. Stevens was appointed by Gerald Ford in 1975 and quickly became a liberal stalwart until his retirement in 2010. The Second Amendment provides for, in exact words, “a well regulated militia...
By James Dail (CMC ’20) Should someone be compelled to pay a fee to an organization whose values they do not agree with? This is the key question in the Supreme Court case Janus v. AFSCME, although its effects will be more far-reaching than only answering a question about freedom of speech. If the Court rules in favor of Janus, then this could cause the permanent decline of public sector...
By Bryce Wachtell (PO ’21) The Trump Administration recently proposed the inclusion of a citizenship question in the decennial U.S. census, a move that sparked swift backlash and lawsuits in at least twelve states including California and New York. Though the administration’s decision has been swept up in a hurricane of zealous partisanship, the legal bedrock of arguments for and against the...
By Jenna Lewinstein (SC ’19) President Donald Trump emphasizes that in his first months in office, he signed more bills than any other president. At this point in Trump’s presidency, he has fallen far behind on legislation passed. Regardless, the claim made concerning his first months is misleading, as the plurality of his bills from his first 6 months in office were passed thanks to the...
By Elinor Aspegren (PZ ’20) Signs with proclamations such as,“Enough is Enough” and “Am I Next?” dotted the streets of Washington DC at the March for Our Lives on March 24, 2018. The march’s purpose was to advocate for increased gun control policy, largely calling for a ban on assault weapons in response to a recent school shooting. But a federal weapons assault ban has already been tried —...
By James Dail (CMC ’20) Something has gone horribly wrong with Congress. In 2015, there was a study done analyzing Congressional Roll Call Vote Data that found that over the past sixty years, there has been a marked increase in the partisanship of Congress. This has led to fewer Democrats voting for Republican sponsored bills and vice-versa, as well as fewer bipartisan co-sponsorships of...
By Jessie Levin (PO ’18) As a future which includes autonomous cars becomes a reality, the manner in which car accidents are handled will need to be reworked. On March 18th, 2018, a woman walking her bike along the the road in Tempe, Arizona was killed when she was hit by an autonomous Uber. Despite the fact that the Uber had a human in the driver’s seat as an extra precaution...
By Bryce Wachtell (PO ’21) On March 17, The New York Times published a story on the prohibited use of Facebook-gathered data harvested from fifty million people to inform the work of Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling company working with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The story has erupted in recent days, bringing concerns of privacy to a high. However, major legal...
By Wesley Whitaker (CMC ’18) Introduction While discussions of affirmative action typically revolve around the decisions of the Supreme Court, the battle for affirmative action in California played out over the airways and door to door, rather than in a courtroom. The first major piece of civil rights legislation to be voted on by the public, Proposition 209 was approved by a majority of...
