Welcome to The Fulcrum’s daily weekday e-newsletter where insiders and outsiders to politics are informed, meet, talk, and act to repair our democracy and make it live and work in our everyday lives.
Podcast: Kevin, Tucker and wokism, oh my!
In this episode, David Riordan covers the narrative around Kevin McCarthy giving Tucker Carlson an exclusive. Debilyn Molineaux talks about the underlying reasons that woke and anti-woke are used to recruit voters.
D.C. voter suppression by the Federal Government
How is it that 700,000 citizens of the United States are explicitly prevented from voting in Congressional elections? And what should be done about it?
In recent news, the residents of Washington, D.C., through their municipal government representatives, sought to make significant changes to their criminal code. Congress is poised to reject the new law on the basis that it will worsen public safety in the nation’s capital. President Biden has indicated that he will not veto that rejection. Among the controversial provisions are the elimination of the death penalty, and the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences for all crimes except first-degree murder. Supporters claim it is a necessary revision to century-old laws. The D.C. Council overrode Mayor Muriel Bowser’s veto of the law.
Why SVB and Signature Bank failed so fast – and the US banking crisis isn’t over yet
Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed with enormous speed – so quickly that they could be textbook cases of classic bank runs, in which too many depositors withdraw their funds from a bank at the same time. The failures at SVB and Signature were two of the three biggest in U.S. banking history, following the collapse of Washington Mutual in 2008.
How could this happen when the banking industry has been sitting on record levels of excess reserves – or the amount of cash held beyond what regulators require?
Podcast: A tricky dance
In this episode, Kyle Kondik discusses the 2024 Republican presidential primary field even though we’re still about a year away from actual voting. In the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (who has yet to declare a bid) together get about 75% of the total support. And Trump is leading by 25 percentage points among potential Republican primary voters, 53% to 28%. Is the Republican Party ready to move on from Trump?
