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HR 1 Would Complicate McConnell’s Re-election

Enacting the House Democrats' political overhaul package would make Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's 2020 re-election bid more problematic.

Kentucky is one of only three states where convicted felons are forever barred from voting. Last week the League of Women Voters of Kentucky estimated that more than 312,000 people in the state fall under this prohibition, a 67 percent increase over a similar study in 2006.



The House bill, dubbed HR 1, would allow felons to vote in federal elections after they're out of prison. And it's a reasonable supposition this would benefit Democrats because those new voters tend to be disproportionately poor and non-white.

McConnell, who says he'll seek a seventh term next year, "is reinforcing his ideological position on something he has a personal interest in," Nicole Porter, director of advocacy for The Sentencing Project, which advocates for lifting felony bans, told McClatchy's Washington bureau.

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New York Post front page reads "Injustice." Daily News front page reads "Guilty."

New York's daily newspapers had very different headlines the morning after Donald Trump was convicted in s hush money trial.

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Why the American media and their critics won’t stop telling the same lie

The American media has a bootleggers-and-Baptists problem.

Bootleggers and Baptists” is one of the most useful concepts in understanding how economic regulation works in the real world. Coined by economist Bruce Yandle, the term describes how groups that are ostensibly opposed to each other have a shared interest in maintaining the status quo. Baptists favored prohibition, and so did bootleggers who profited by selling illegal alcohol. And politicians benefited by playing both sides.

There’s an analogous dynamic with the press today.

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city skyline

Reading, Pennsylvania, can be a model for a path forward.

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The election couldn’t solve our crisis of belief. Here’s what can.

The stark divisions surrounding the recent presidential election are still with us, and will be for some time. The reason is clear: We have a crisis of belief in this country that goes much deeper than any single election.

So many people, especially young people, have lost faith in America. We have lost belief in our leaders, institutions and systems. Even in one another. Recent years have seen us roiled by debates over racial injustice, fatigued by wars, troubled by growing inequities and disparities, and worried about the very health of our democracy. We are awash in manufactured polarization, hatred and bigotry, mistrust, and a lack of hope.

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