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Senators propose ban on individual stock holdings by members of Congress

Two Democratic senators, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, want to prevent a revival of ethically questionable investing on Capitol Hill by proposing legislation to prevent lawmakers and senior aides from trading in individual securities.

Their measure would build on some of the toughest ethical restrictions Congress has imposed on itself in recent years: Seven years ago, Congress passed the Stock Act, which focused on preventing members of Congress from using insider information to profit in the markets.


The bill faces at least initially uphill prospects in the Republican-run Senate. Roll Call reports it would give members six months to sell their portfolios or put them into blind trusts for the duration of their time in office. They would then be allowed to trade only in mutual funds. And members would be barred from the boards of public companies, a provision added to the House-passed political overhaul HR 1 after a GOP House member, Chris Collins of New York, was indicted last year for insider trading in a drug company on whose board he sat. The case was one of the highest-profile alleged ethical transgressions on the Hill in recent years, but Collins won anyway.

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A better direction for democracy reform

Denver election judge Eric Cobb carefully looks over ballots as counting continued on Nov. 6. Voters in Colorado rejected a ranked choice voting and open primaries measure.

Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

A better direction for democracy reform

Drutman is a senior fellow at New America and author "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America."

This is the conclusion of a two-part, post-election series addressing the questions of what happened, why, what does it mean and what did we learn? Read part one.

I think there is a better direction for reform than the ranked choice voting and open primary proposals that were defeated on Election Day: combining fusion voting for single-winner elections with party-list proportional representation for multi-winner elections. This straightforward solution addresses the core problems voters care about: lack of choices, gerrymandering, lack of competition, etc., with a single transformative sweep.

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Clionadh Raleigh

Political polarization has become entertainment: A conversation with Clionadh Raleigh

Berman is a distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, co-editor of Vital City, and co-author of "Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age." This is part of a series of interviews titled "The Polarization Project."

Clionadh Raleigh, a professor of political violence and geography at the University of Sussex, has been studying violence for more than 20 years and has come to a depressing conclusion: Global rates of conflict are rising dramatically. Raleigh tracks global conflict with the help of researchers at Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, an organization she helped to create when she was a PhD student.

According to Raleigh, the rise in violence reflects the chaotic politics we are living through at the moment. “The most potent and growing forces in the world are political competition and authoritarianism, not inclusion, democracy, or a desire for peace,” she argues.

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Silhouette of an American politician speakting , with the country's flag on the left
Andrea Nicolini/Getty Images

Coming to terms with elitism and intellectual arrogance

Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”

Over the past 11 months I have written more than 30 essays for The Fulcrum’s A Republic if we can keep it series. My charge was “to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year,” and to remind readers of the matchless quality of our unique experiment in democracy. The process of putting these constitutional thoughts on paper has been exceedingly rewarding, and I hope readers have learned a thing or two along the way.

Sadly, though, I now fear that I failed miserably in my one crucial task.

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