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New Mexico lawmakers debate allowing convicts to vote

New Mexico's legislature this week began considering a bill to give convicted felons the right to vote while incarcerated or on parole. The legislation would go further than the initiative approved by last fall by Florida voters, who restored voting rights for all convicted felons, except murderers and sex offenders, and further than the law President Trump signed in December, easing some of the most punitive prison sentences at the federal level without restoring the franchise to federal convicts.

In Albuquerque, supporters told a state House panel the bill was an important vehicle for boosting the rights of minority groups that have historically had disproportionately high incarceration rates. Opponents lambasted the idea of extending such rights to violent offenders.



The bill's sponsor, Democratic state Rep. Gail Chasey, citing statistics that show 94 percent of New Mexico's 7,000 inmates will eventually be released, said allowing them to be politically active while in prison will make them more engaged citizens when they get out.

Under current New Mexico law, people convicted of felonies are removed from the voting rolls and prohibited from voting again until after they have completed their sentence, probation or parole. Maine and Vermont are the only states that do not take the vote away from the incarcerated.

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Meet the change leaders: Scott Klug

Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.

After a 14-year career as an Emmy-winning reporter, Scott Klug upset a 32-year Democratic House member from Wisconsin in 1990. Despite winning four elections with an average of 63 percent of the vote, he stayed true to his term limit pledge and retired in January 1999.

But during his time in office, Klug says, he had the third most independent voting record of any member of Congress from Wisconsin in the last 50 years.

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Donald Trump at a podium

Former President Donald Trump recently said Vice President Kamala Harris is mentally impaired.

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We should not denigrate the mentally impaired

Schmidt is a columnist and editorial board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Ableism, the social prejudice and discrimination of people with disabilities based on the belief that typical abilities are superior, is just plain wrong and it is also un-American.

At a recent campaign rally in Prairie du Chien, Wis., former President Donald Trump disparaged Vice President Kamala Harris, suggesting she was mentally disabled and called her “a very dumb person.”

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Heavily Hispanic areas near Chicago are home to environmental racism.

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Hispanic neighborhoods in Chicago suffer unequal exposure to chemicals

Sharp is chief financial officer at Environmental Litigation Group, P.C., a law firm based in Birmingham, Ala., that assists individuals and communities injured by toxic exposure.

The predominantly Hispanic populations in Rosemont, Schiller Park and Bensenville, near Chicago, have long been exposed to toxic chemicals known as PFAS originating from the neighboring O'Hare Air Reserve Station, which was closed in 1999. The phenomenon of environmental racism is not new to Chicago. Sites and facilities hazardous to the environment and human health have been placed near communities predominantly populated by Hispanic and Black people in the city for years.

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Gerald Ford

Republicans, including Gerald Ford in 1976, held the White House on the occasion of each of America's milestone birthdays.

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America at 250, and the Fourth of July presidents

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.”

This is the latest in “A Republic, if we can keep it,” a series to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year. By highlighting components, principles and stories of the Constitution, Breslin hopes to remind us that the American political experiment remains, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, the “most interesting in the world.”

An odd pattern has emerged in the history of presidential politics. Every time the United States celebrates a major birthday milestone, a Republican sits in the White House.

When America celebrated its golden jubilee in 1826, Democratic-Republican John Quincy Adams was enjoying his second year as the country’s chief executive. When the nation rejoiced that it had reached its centennial 100 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Ulysses S. Grant was our president. At America’s sesquicentennial in 1926, Calvin Coolidge occupied the White House. And during the bicentennial almost 50 years ago, Gerald Ford was completing his one and only term at the helm.

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