Tag: democrats
The Democratic Party’s Future Is Uncertain
Since mid-summer, Democrats have been trapped in a downward spiral of declining approval ratings for President Joe Biden, rising public anxiety about the country’s direction, and widening internal divisions over the party’s legislative agenda. The next few weeks will likely determine whether they have bottomed out and can begin to regain momentum before next year’s midterm elections.
Roughly since the rise of the Delta variant sent COVID-19 caseloads soaring again, the White House and congressional Democrats have faced a debilitating
The Curse of a President’s Second Year
It’s common now for Democrats to argue that the agenda they are struggling to implement on Capitol Hill represents the party’s most ambitious since the “Great Society” Congress convened in 1965. That’s a reasonable assessment—but one that the party today should consider as much a warning as an inspiration. Under the relentless prodding of President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Democratic-controlled House and Senate passed landmark legislation at a dizzying pace during that legendary 1965–66 legislative session.
Over those two years,
Democrats Are Ready to Abandon Black Voters, Again
Marco Rubio and Kelly O’Donnell Q&A
Despite the whirlwind in Washington this week, Marco Rubio isn’t worried—at least for his own party. As of now, Democrats have reached a deal to stave off a government shutdown until December, but they still need to prevent another crisis: a first-ever default on the national debt. Rubio is among the Senate Republicans who blocked efforts to raise the debt ceiling, effectively forcing Democrats to make the move on their own. “If you’re going to make a decision to ram
Voter ID: Why Doesn’t America Have a National ID Card?
Democrats in Congress are considering a policy that was long unthinkable: a federal requirement that every American show identification before casting a ballot. But as the party tries to pass voting-rights legislation before the next election, it is ignoring a companion proposal that could ensure that a voter-ID law leaves no one behind—an idea that is as obvious as it is historically controversial. What if the government simply gave an ID card to every voting-age citizen in the country?
Vaccine Mandates: How Republicans and Democrats Feel
The vaccinated, across party lines, have kind of had it with the unvaccinated, an array of new polls suggests.
While most state and national GOP leaders are focused on defending the rights of unvaccinated Americans, new polling shows that the large majority of vaccinated adults—including a substantial portion of Republicans—support tougher measures against those who have refused COVID-19 shots.
These new results, shared exclusively with The Atlantic by several pollsters, reveal that significant majorities of people who have been vaccinated
The Trial of Chesa Boudin
Of all the progressive prosecutors elected in American cities during the law-and-order Trump years, none embodied the hope for criminal-justice reform as perfectly as San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin. The son of the infamous political radicals Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, Boudin grew up visiting his parents in prison, and began speaking publicly about the brutalities and racial inequities of the penal system when he was a teen-ager. Even by the standards of the criminal-justice-reform movement, he struck visionary notes in
The Democrats Are Bungling Voting Rights—but Not in the Way You Think
How Democrats Are Fighting to Save Voting Rights
There is a gnawing anxiety among voting-rights advocates that even if Democrats find a way to roll back the Senate filibuster and pass new federal legislation safeguarding access to the ballot, the Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court might still strike it down.
Last week’s Supreme Court ruling, in which the six Republican-appointed justices outvoted the three appointed by Democrats to uphold two Arizona laws that critics called racially discriminatory, has elevated that concern to a new height. It is
How Democrats Lost the Courts—And Plan to Win Them Back
Every political coalition likes to talk about how its opponents are more organized, more ruthless, and better funded. As progressives plot their response to Donald Trump’s mostly successful project to remake the federal courts, they are reviewing the times they’ve been outworked, outfought, and outsmarted on judicial nominations. One not-so-familiar name jumps out: Before Merrick Garland’s stint in purgatory, before Brett Kavanaugh’s furious denial of assault allegations, before Amy Coney Barrett’s eleventh-hour confirmation, there was Goodwin Liu.
In 2010, Democrats