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Designing youth civic education for representative civic participation

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Dana Harris

Harris is the advocacy director of Generation Citizen, an education nonprofit that works to ensure young people are prepared to participate in civic life.

As we watch young people around the country stand up for climate change, it is impossible not to consider the power of young people to change our world.

People have been listening to Greta Thurnburg as she speaks on the world's most prominent platforms while droves of young people have been rolling up their sleeves to drive change. Many have been largely overlooked by the media including Mari Copeny, the African-American middle schooler who brought attention to the water crisis in Flint, Mich., and Vic Barrett, one of 22 young plaintiffs suing the government for its contributions to the climate crisis.

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Mississippi's election law designed for racial discrimination, suit alleges

Our Staff

Mississippi, normally as Republican red as any state, is expecting one of its closest gubernatorial races in years. But four African-American voters have sued in federal court to block the conduct of the election under the state's unique system, which they argue is racially discriminatory.

Since the 1890s, governors and other statewide candidates have had to win a two-tiered contest — securing not only a majority of the votes statewide, but also carrying most of the 122 state House districts. If no candidate crosses both thresholds then the state House, now solidly Republican, picks the winner.

The plaintiffs say the records of the 19th century legislative debate make clear that the system was designed explicitly to make sure an African-American could not win statewide, and none ever has.

The suit is being pushed by the National Redistricting Foundation, a political action committee headed by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and affiliated with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.

Bill would designate Jan. 24 as ‘Granny D Day’ in New Hampshire

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A New Hampshire lawmaker has proposed legislation to establish Jan. 24 as "Granny D Day" to honor the beloved political activist.

A Granite State native, Doris "Granny D" Haddock was known across the country for her dedication to campaign finance reform. She died at age 100 in 2010. Friday would have been her 110th birthday.

In 1999, at the age of 88, Granny D embarked on a 3,200-mile walk from California to Washington, D.C., to bring attention to the need for campaign finance reform. The journey ended with a rally at the Capitol 14 months later.

Inspiring Poet

Amanda Gorman is not only an inspiring poet, but a civic futurist

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Lisa Kay Solomon

Solomon is on the faculty of Stanford University's design school and a creator of Vote by Design, an educational site designed to promote civic and political engagement among younger voters.

"Now more than ever, the United States needs an inaugural poem," Amanda Gorman told an interviewer a few days before the world got to know her last week. "Poetry is typically the touchstone that we go back to when we have to remind ourselves of the history that we stand on, and the future that we stand for."

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Joe Biden being interviewed by Lester Holt

The day after calling on people to “lower the temperature in our politics,” President Biden resort to traditionally divisive language in an interview with NBC's Lester Holt.

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One day and 28 minutes

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.”

One day.

One single day. That’s how long it took for President Joe Biden to abandon his call to “lower the temperature in our politics” following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. “I believe politics ought to be an arena for peaceful debate,” he implored. Not messages tinged with violent language and caustic oratory. Peaceful, dignified, respectful language.

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Project 2025: The Department of Labor

Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.

This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for Donald Trump’s return to the White House, is an ambitious manifesto to redesign the federal government and its many administrative agencies to support and sustain neo-conservative dominance for the next decade. One of the agencies in its crosshairs is the Department of Labor, as well as its affiliated agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

Project 2025 proposes a remake of the Department of Labor in order to roll back decades of labor laws and rights amidst a nostalgic “back to the future” framing based on race, gender, religion and anti-abortion sentiment. But oddly, tucked into the corners of the document are some real nuggets of innovative and progressive thinking that propose certain labor rights which even many liberals have never dared to propose.

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Donald Trump on stage at the Republican National Convention

Former President Donald Trump speaks at the 2024 Republican National Convention on July 18.

J. Conrad Williams Jr.

Why Trump assassination attempt theories show lies never end

By: Michele Weldon: Weldon is an author, journalist, emerita faculty in journalism at Northwestern University and senior leader with The OpEd Project. Her latest book is “The Time We Have: Essays on Pandemic Living.”

Diamonds are forever, or at least that was the title of the 1971 James Bond movie and an even earlier 1947 advertising campaign for DeBeers jewelry. Tattoos, belief systems, truth and relationships are also supposed to last forever — that is, until they are removed, disproven, ended or disintegrate.

Lately we have questioned whether Covid really will last forever and, with it, the parallel pandemic of misinformation it spawned. The new rash of conspiracy theories and unproven proclamations about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump signals that the plague of lies may last forever, too.

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Painting of people voting

"The County Election" by George Caleb Bingham

Sister democracies share an inherited flaw

Myers is executive director of the ProRep Coalition. Nickerson is executive director of Fair Vote Canada, a campaign for proportional representations (not affiliated with the U.S. reform organization FairVote.)

Among all advanced democracies, perhaps no two countries have a closer relationship — or more in common — than the United States and Canada. Our strong connection is partly due to geography: we share the longest border between any two countries and have a free trade agreement that’s made our economies reliant on one another. But our ties run much deeper than just that of friendly neighbors. As former British colonies, we’re siblings sharing a parent. And like actual siblings, whether we like it or not, we’ve inherited some of our parent’s flaws.

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Constitutional Convention

It's up to us to improve on what the framers gave us at the Constitutional Convention.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

It’s our turn to form a more perfect union

Sturner is the author of “Fairness Matters,” and managing partner of Entourage Effect Capital.

This is the third entry in the “Fairness Matters” series, examining structural problems with the current political systems, critical policies issues that are going unaddressed and the state of the 2024 election.

The Preamble to the Constitution reads:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

What troubles me deeply about the politics industry today is that it feels like we have lost our grasp on those immortal words.

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