• Home
  • Opinion
  • Quizzes
  • Redistricting
  • Sections
  • About Us
  • Voting
  • Events
  • Civic Ed
  • Campaign Finance
  • Directory
  • Election Dissection
  • Fact Check
  • Glossary
  • Independent Voter News
  • News
  • Analysis
  • Subscriptions
  • Log in
Leveraging Our Differences
  • news & opinion
    • Big Picture
      • Civic Ed
      • Ethics
      • Leadership
      • Leveraging big ideas
      • Media
    • Business & Democracy
      • Corporate Responsibility
      • Impact Investment
      • Innovation & Incubation
      • Small Businesses
      • Stakeholder Capitalism
    • Elections
      • Campaign Finance
      • Independent Voter News
      • Redistricting
      • Voting
    • Government
      • Balance of Power
      • Budgeting
      • Congress
      • Judicial
      • Local
      • State
      • White House
    • Justice
      • Accountability
      • Anti-corruption
      • Budget equity
    • Columns
      • Beyond Right and Left
      • Civic Soul
      • Congress at a Crossroads
      • Cross-Partisan Visions
      • Democracy Pie
      • Our Freedom
  • Pop Culture
      • American Heroes
      • Ask Joe
      • Celebrity News
      • Comedy
      • Dance, Theatre & Film
      • Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
      • Faithful & Mindful Living
      • Music, Poetry & Arts
      • Sports
      • Technology
      • Your Take
      • American Heroes
      • Ask Joe
      • Celebrity News
      • Comedy
      • Dance, Theatre & Film
      • Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
      • Faithful & Mindful Living
      • Music, Poetry & Arts
      • Sports
      • Technology
      • Your Take
  • events
  • About
      • Mission
      • Advisory Board
      • Staff
      • Contact Us
Sign Up
  1. Home>
  2. Newsletter>
  3. newsletter>

Op-eds of the week: Gun violence, abortion and threats to democracy

The Fulcrum
June 17, 2022



Our weekly op-ed highlight reel

The Fulcrum is a forum for debate about what's ailing American democracy and what could make the system healthier. Here are the most recent arguments from our columnists and other contributors.

Election subversion remains a threat, but some voting restrictions go too far

Jabin Botsford-Pool/Getty Images

While the Jan. 6 hearings have focused on Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert the election process, they have also revealed a second – but dangerous – threat to democracy: efforts to keep people from voting. Even though the 2020 election was the most secure election in history and set turnout records, officials in some states aren’t trying to build on that success, according to David Levine, an elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy.

Rather than seeing the wisdom of expanded access, far too many states — fueled in part by the same mis- and disinformation arising that contributed to the insurrection — are unjustifiably reversing course, creating challenges for their 2022 elections and/or future ones.

Read more.

Ballots and bullets

Ringo Chiu/AFP via Getty Images

Conservatives who fight any limits on gun rights typically point to the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s landmark opinion in D.C. v. Heller as opening the floodgates to unrestricted gun ownership. But, as author Lawrence Goldstone writes, even that ruling was not absolute, and it overturned two centuries of precedent.

Prior to Heller, the most important ruling on gun rights came in 1939. United States v. Miller found that guns not used as part of a militia are not protected.

The Miller decision attracted little attention at the time, since almost no one interpreted the Second Amendment as anything other than an anachronism, rendered obsolete by the creation of a professional military. And so it remained, despite numerous attempts by gun worshipers to pretend the opening clause did not exist. That they finally found their spiritual bedfellow in the person of a man fond of trumpeting his reverence for the text of the Constitution, who sneered at judges who took into account such silly factors as “intent,” is the saddest of ironies.

Read more.

Broad but invisible voter suppression is taking place in Tennessee

AndreyKrav/Getty Images

“Voter suppression” often conjures thoughts of restricting voting laws, long lines at polling places, and purges of the voter rolls. But there are other, more subtle, ways through which partisans try to keep their opponents from casting ballots.

Gabe Hart, a columnist for the Tennessee Lookout, and John Opdyke, president of Open Primaries, wrote about the confusing state of affairs in the Volunteer State, which requires voters to “affiliate” with a party to take part in a primary – but does not register voters by party. So party officials are threatening criminal charges against voters, even when there’s no mechanism to comply with the law they have supposedly broken.

This was not surgical voter suppression. It was a broad intimidation campaign to keep everyone at home except partisan activists.

This is the voter suppression no one talks about – partisan politicians using intimidating tactics to lie to voters and keep them from exercising their rights to choose their leaders.

Read more.

Having a glass of wine will be child abuse if Roe is overturned

Anton Petrus/Getty Images

The impending Supreme Court ruling that is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade will do far more than remove federal protections for abortion rights, according to Robert Pearl, who teaches in both the medical and business programs at Stanford University. It will turn millions of women into instant criminals for practicing otherwise legal habits.

For example:

If a fetus is a living human, then smoking while pregnant would be equivalent to supplying cigarettes to a minor, punishable in most states by a large fine and possible jail time. Added to those penalties is the possibility of applicable child-endangerment laws. After all, nicotine dangerously reduces oxygen supply while smoke inhalation sends carbon monoxide directly to the fetus, both highly damaging. Prenatal heart defects, cleft lip and even miscarriage are just a few of the well-known consequences of smoking or breathing in second-hand smoke during the early part of fetal development. If such behaviors were to result in the death of a fetus, state prosecutors could see fit to charge parents with manslaughter or negligent homicide.

Read more.

An antidote to hopelessness: Join the Civic Season this summer

Jordi Salas/Getty Images

Perhaps you’ve been thinking, “I feel helpless to make change. There’s nothing an average person can do.” If that’s the case, or you’re just wondering how you can help others, then Caroline Klibanoff has a suggestion for you. The managing director of Made By Us wants you to get involved in the Civic Season.

Running from Juneteenth to July Fourth, the Civic Season brings together more than 150 museums, historic sites and historical societies providing fun, educational opportunities to learn more about America and American values.

She writes:

Many, perhaps even most, of us want to be engaged citizens. It is rewarding to feel that you have a say in the direction of your country, and to activate that power; and it is frustrating to feel that you can’t make a difference in nudging the world a bit closer to your own values. Civic Season offers avenues to explore those values, critical context to understand yourself as part of your community/country/world, and paths to take action and be heard.

Additional reading: The “stuff” democracy is made of

Your take: The Jan. 6 hearings

As the hearings probing the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol got underway, we asked you four questions:

  • What evidence has surprised you?
  • Have you heard any evidence that has changed your perspective on Jan. 6? If so, how has it changed?
  • If you were sitting in a jury, what would you be analyzing and thinking?
  • What more would you want to know?

Responses ranged from affirmation to claims of a witch hunt to nuanced approaches.

Read our readers’ responses.

newsletter

Want to write
for The Fulcrum?

If you have something to say about ways to protect or repair our American democracy, we want to hear from you.

Submit
Get some Leverage Sign up for The Fulcrum Newsletter
Follow
Contributors

The myth of the 'unamendable' Constitution

Jeff Clements

The student vote provides an important roadmap for democracy and higher education

Clarissa Unger
Manny Rin

The midterms were a win for free and fair elections. Nativists are still coming for democracy.

Elizabeth Yates

A ‘Spirited’ approach to healing division

Lynn Schmidt

How does bridging divides support pro-democracy efforts?

Debilyn Molineaux

Speaker Pelosi has prepared a generation of young women to take the torch

Sara Guillermo
latest News

What’s next for approval voting?

David Meyers
9h

Podcast: What if I can’t vote in person?

Our Staff
15h

Court prepares to hear arguments in case that could upend system of checks and balances

David Meyers
05 December

The state of voting: Dec. 5, 2022

Our Staff
05 December

Healthy democracy requires trust – these 3 things could start to restore voters’ declining faith in elections

Sarah Bush
Lauren Prather
02 December

Which states will be the next to consider open primaries?

Kristin Shiuey
01 December
Videos

Video: Is democracy all good now?

Our Staff

Video: What is Final Five voting and how could it fix US elections?

Our Staff

Video: Family and politics: A Braver Angels debate

Our Staff

Video: Democracy on the ballot: What the 2022 election means for business

Our Staff

Video: Would scrapping Twitter benefit American Democracy?

Our Staff

Video: What’s your ‘red line’?

Our Staff
Podcasts

Podcast: What if I can’t vote in person?

Our Staff
15h

Podcast: Is ranked choice voting a cure for what ails politics?

Our Staff
29 November

Podcast: Jamelle Bouie makes the case for majoritarianism

Our Staff
28 November

Podcast: “I never thought of it that way” with Mónica Guzmán

Our Staff
25 November
Recommended
approval voting

What’s next for approval voting?

Voting
constitutional amendments

The myth of the 'unamendable' Constitution

Campaign Finance
Podcast: What if I can’t vote in person?

Podcast: What if I can’t vote in person?

Podcasts
Supreme Court

Court prepares to hear arguments in case that could upend system of checks and balances

Judicial
voting legislation updates

The state of voting: Dec. 5, 2022

Local
Video: Is democracy all good now?

Video: Is democracy all good now?