Healthcare comprises almost 20% of the United States gross national product. In our effort to keep our readers informed about the topics that most impact on their lives we presented a writing last week by Dr. Robert Pearl entitled, “ In healthcare’s game of Monopoly, one player will control the board, ” in which Dr. Robert Pearl presented a private solutions to inefficiencies and problems that exist in America’s health care industry. Today we present a video from IssueOne examining the healthcare industry. Right now, healthcare lobbyists are legally allowed to buy our elected officials’ votes. As long as that’s the case, our representatives will continue to choose campaign donations over Americans’ lives. The healthcare industry spends more than anyone else lobbying politicians to rig the system on their behalf. That should be illegal, but it’s not.
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A rundown of the House bills most likely to become law this week — from seafood fraud enforcement to a sanctions bill critics call a tariff bill.
Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash
Both Chambers in Session this Week
Sep 17, 2026
Last Minute Rush
We’re not going to describe every bill the House aims to take action on this week because there’s lots. Instead, we’re going to focus on the ones that will become law if passed by the House and pull a few notable bills at the beginning of the legislative process. We’ll use the same level of discretion at the end of this week when we review what actually happened between today, Monday Sept. 14 and Friday, Sept. 18.
Probable New Laws
In addition to the bills listed below are also a couple of park renamings. All of these will, if passed, then go to the President for signing and once that’s done, become law.
- S. 283: Illegal Red Snapper and Tuna Enforcement Act would require the Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and the Administrator of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to develop a standard methodology for identifying the country of origin of seafood to support enforcement against illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing.
- S. 759: Modernizing Access to Our Public Oceans Act which would provide for standardization, publication, and accessibility of data relating to public outdoor recreational use of Federal waterways.
- S. 240: Crow Tribe Water Rights Settlement Amendments Act of 2025 would make changes described by Congress.gov.
- S. 550: A bill to provide for the equitable settlement of certain Indian land disputes regarding land in Illinois would extend the time for settling treaties from the 19th century for one year into the future from passage and designate a federal court to handle the case.
- S. 195: American Music Tourism Act of 2025
- S. 2398: Kay Hagan Tick Reauthorization Act would reauthorize funding for public health responses to tick-borne diseases.
- S. 2403: Retire through Ownership Act would establish rules for independent evaluators of employee pension plans where such evaluators are needed, according to Congress.gov.
- S. 766: Billion Dollar Boondoggle Act of 2025 would require an annual report of taxpayer-funded projects that are over budget and behind schedule.
- H.R. 5334: Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 may in fact do the opposite of its title. According to an analysis on The Bulwark, the sanctions part provides no new powers nor imposes no new requirements on the President. As for tariffs, the wording is extremely vague and Catherine Rampell, the Bulwark author, argues persuasively that it would significantly expand the President’s ability to tariff globally as he sees fit. It has the support of Democrats in both chambers. Even though this bill is an “HR”, it has been in the Senate already where a different bill originally assigned this number was replaced with new text. Thus, if it passes the House this week without more amendments, it will go to the President for signing.
Other Notable House Votes
While none of these bills are close to becoming law, they are interesting for a variety of reasons.
- H.R. 979: AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2025; the rationale for this bill is that other communication technologies are not guaranteed in rural or mountainous areas while AM stations are readily available. This would effectively be a new regulation since it would require car makers to include AM which they don’t always do now.
- H.R. 9340: Ratepayer Protection Act would, despite its name, mostly provide support for data centers and other intensive users of existing power resources, according to The Guardian
- H.R. 2004: Tyler’s Law would require testing for fentanyl for suspected overdoses in emergency rooms. We wrote about the complexities of getting bills passed using this bill as an example a year ago. What we said then is necessarily even more true now.
- H.R. 10167: Common Cents Act; this bill would codify the end of the penny as well as direct retailers to round all prices down or up to the nearest nickel.
- H.R. 10204: Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act. This bill would eliminate “the presidential nomination process for appointment of the Librarian of Congress and Director of GPO, allowing them to be chosen exclusively by Congress through a bipartisan commission. It also removes the Librarian’s supervisory authority over the Register of Copyrights and the Copyright Office while maintaining the support it receives from the Library. The bill also establishes an Office of Inspector General at the Copyright Office and requires GPO to establish a human management system” per our colleagues at First Branch Forecast
Upcoming Articles
We will be writing about what action there is so far on cryptocurrency regulation as well as reviewing the current AI hype and Congressional legislation.
Both Chambers in Session this Week was originally published by GovTrack and is republished with permission.
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Young man voting in polling place
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Beyond the Ballot: A Citizen Chamber for the Twenty-First Century
Sep 16, 2026
Democracy is facing a paradox. Around the world, citizens continue to support democratic ideals while simultaneously losing faith in democratic institutions. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, a median of 59% of respondents across 24 countries were dissatisfied with how democracy functions in their own nation. Yet despite this frustration, support for democratic governance remains resilient. The crisis confronting liberal democracy is therefore not a rejection of democracy itself, but a growing belief that voting alone no longer provides meaningful political influence.
This dissatisfaction is particularly pronounced among younger generations. In many democracies, turnout among younger voters consistently lags behind older cohorts, and surveys show declining trust in legislatures, parties, and executive institutions. Political participation increasingly feels symbolic: citizens are asked to choose between broad coalitions every few years while day-to-day policy formation occurs in spaces largely insulated from public input. Lobbyists, party elites, bureaucratic agencies, and professionalized political consultants often play a more continuous role in shaping policy than voters themselves.
The result is a participation gap. Citizens are formally sovereign but functionally distant from governance. This gap does not necessarily produce apathy, but it does produce frustration: the sense that democratic systems are procedurally intact yet substantively unresponsive.
The solution is not to abandon representative democracy. Elections remain essential for accountability and political stability. But they are insufficient as the sole mechanism of participation. Democracies require additional institutions that allow citizens to exercise meaningful influence between elections. One promising model is a permanent Citizen Chamber: a legislative body composed not of elected politicians but of ordinary citizens selected through democratic lottery, or sortition.
The logic of sortition is not new. In classical Athens, many public offices were filled by lottery rather than election. The Athenians feared that elections would privilege wealth, status, and rhetorical skill, while sortition would distribute political power more evenly across society. Although Athenian democracy was deeply exclusionary by modern standards, its institutional design reflects a durable insight in democratic theory: elections are not the only legitimate way to produce representation.
Modern political science has revisited this idea through deliberative democracy. Across recent decades, governments have experimented with citizens’ assemblies composed of randomly selected participants who deliberate on complex policy questions after hearing expert testimony. The OECD documents (and overviews) hundreds of such assemblies across democratic states. Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly is perhaps the most frequently cited example, playing a significant role in shaping public referendums on abortion and same-sex marriage. In these cases, randomly selected citizens demonstrated a capacity to engage seriously with morally and technically complex issues when given structured time, balanced information, and institutional support.
Yet most citizens’ assemblies share a structural limitation: they are advisory. Governments may choose to ignore their recommendations without consequence. As a result, deliberative institutions often enhance discussion without redistributing actual power. They expand voice but not authority.
A Citizen Chamber would attempt to correct this limitation by embedding sortition directly into the legislative process.
Under this model, a national legislature would become bicameral. The first chamber would remain an elected parliament responsible for initiating legislation, reflecting partisan competition and electoral accountability. The second chamber would be a Citizen Chamber composed of approximately 500 randomly selected citizens chosen through stratified sampling to reflect national demographics, including age, gender, region, education level, and income distribution. Members would serve one-year terms and receive full-time compensation to ensure accessibility across socioeconomic backgrounds.
Crucially, this chamber would possess binding authority. Any major legislation passed by the elected house would require the Citizen Chamber's approval before becoming law. The Citizen Chamber could also delay legislation for reconsideration or require public revision, forcing elected officials to justify policy more transparently. However, it would not initiate legislation independently, preserving elected representatives' agenda-setting role and preventing institutional gridlock.
This structure addresses several well-documented failures of modern democratic systems.
First, it reduces money's influence in politics. Electoral systems reward candidates who can raise funds, build media presence, and maintain party infrastructure. By contrast, selection through lottery eliminates campaign finance entirely. Political authority becomes independent of wealth and professional political ambition.
Second, it improves descriptive representation. In many democracies, legislatures systematically overrepresent older, wealthier, and more educated citizens. For instance, the average member of Congress in the United States is significantly older and wealthier than the median citizen. A randomly selected chamber would likely reflect society’s demographic composition far more accurately than professional politicians.
Third, it may reduce polarization. Electoral incentives often reward ideological signaling, party loyalty, and conflict amplification. Citizens selected by lottery face no reelection pressures and therefore have fewer incentives to perform partisan identity. Empirical research in deliberative settings suggests that structured discussion among diverse participants can reduce polarization and increase willingness to compromise.
However, these advantages come with serious risks.
The most immediate concern is competence. Public policy increasingly involves technical domains such as monetary policy, artificial intelligence regulation, and climate modeling. Randomly selected citizens may lack the expertise required for such decisions. Yet this critique often overstates the expertise of elected officials themselves, many of whom rely heavily on staff, think tanks, and agency bureaucracies. The relevant comparison is not between citizens and experts, but between citizens and professional politicians operating under similar informational constraints. A Citizen Chamber would mitigate knowledge gaps by requiring structured expert testimony from multiple perspectives and providing nonpartisan policy briefings.
A second risk is manipulation. In an era of fragmented media ecosystems and algorithmic information flows, any deliberative body is vulnerable to misinformation. Institutional design cannot fully eliminate this challenge. However, it can be reduced through transparency requirements, public documentation of deliberations, and strict rules governing evidentiary standards during testimony.
A third concern is legitimacy. Critics may argue that randomly selected citizens lack democratic mandate. Yet democratic legitimacy does not arise solely from electoral victory. It arises from representativeness and consent. A statistically representative sample of citizens, selected through transparent randomization procedures, may in fact reflect the population more faithfully than electoral systems shaped by turnout disparities, gerrymandering, and campaign financing inequalities.
Importantly, such a reform should not be implemented abruptly. Democratic institutions rarely tolerate sudden redistribution of power. A more realistic pathway would involve gradual experimentation at local and state levels. Participatory budgeting programs and municipal deliberative assemblies already demonstrate that citizens can meaningfully engage with policy allocation decisions. Scaling such experiments incrementally would allow democratic systems to build legitimacy and institutional learning over time.
The greatest challenge facing liberal democracy today is not simply authoritarian resurgence, but political disengagement within democratic societies themselves. When citizens believe participation has little effect on outcomes, democratic legitimacy erodes even in formally free systems. Elections remain indispensable, but they cannot be the only way citizens engage with power. A Citizen Chamber would not replace representative democracy, but extend it, transforming citizenship from periodic selection of leaders into continuous participation in governance.
In doing so, it would revive a foundational democratic principle: that political power is most legitimate not when it is distant from ordinary citizens, but when ordinary citizens are meaningfully involved in its exercise.
Dylan Mabee is a high school student with a strong interest in government, public policy, political science, and civic engagement.
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Voting
Alaska Is Voting on More Than Ranked Choice Voting. It’s Voting on Who Gets to Vote
Sep 16, 2026
Alaska voters will once again vote on a measure to repeal its nonpartisan election system. Those fighting to preserve the system have gone to the courts to make a simple case: It’s only fair that voters know exactly what is on their ballot.
Specifically the consequences of Ballot Measure 2, which would give parties the ability to shut out 60% of Alaska voters registered as independents. This is what attorney Scott Kendall argued before the Alaska Supreme Court last week.
Ballot Measure 2 would repeal Alaska’s nonpartisan Top Four primary, eliminate ranked choice voting in general elections, and repeal campaign finance disclosure provisions approved by voters in 2020.
It would likely mean going back to a closed partisan primary system where the partisan political minorities in the state have the most say over representation and party leaders and aligned special interest groups have outsized influence over election outcomes.
The court ultimately ruled that the state’s language was “true and impartial,” ordering only one additional sentence explaining changes to how candidates for governor and lieutenant governor would run. The revised ballot language was released Friday.
But the court’s ruling does not change the fact that Ballot Measure 2 is missing some crucial fine print.
Who Gets to Vote Becomes the Party’s Call
Under Alaska’s current system, every voter receives the same primary ballot. All candidates compete together, regardless of party, and the top four voter-getters advance. Voters can vote for any candidate they want in any race.
If they wanted, they could vote for a Republican in the state’s at-large congressional contest and then vote for a Democrat or an independent or third party candidate for US Senate in the same election.
This is freedom that Ballot Measure 2 would strip away by replacing that system with closed party primaries, which force voters to pick a party to get a meaningful vote in publicly funded elections and restrict their choices to candidates of that party.
That is, if the parties let them vote at all.
The official summary now tells voters that they would choose a party ballot “unless prohibited by the party’s bylaws.”
The actual text of the measure goes further. It says political parties may establish rules that expand or limit participation, and if a party’s bylaws exclude nonpartisan or undeclared voters, election officials “may not permit” those voters to cast that party’s ballot.
This was central to Kendall’s case.
He argued that voters should not have to piece together what restoring “political party primaries” means for their own voting rights. He told the justices that the measure gives parties the power, “at the stroke of a pen,” to prevent independent Alaskans from participating in primaries.
The state disagreed. Assistant Attorney General Laura Fox argued that the legal question was not whether judges could write a better summary, but whether the existing language crossed Alaska’s statutory threshold of being accurate and impartial.
The Supreme Court largely agreed.
Supporters of the repeal also challenged parts of the state’s wording. Attorneys for Repeal Now objected to terms including “repeal” and “true source,” arguing that some language was confusing or carried partisan implications. Those objections were also largely rejected.
It is the second consecutive election in which Alaskans will vote on repealing the system. A similar measure failed in 2024 after a recount by just 743 votes.
California Is Having the Same Fight
Nearly 3,000 miles away, California is confronting a similar dispute.
A proposed initiative called “Undo the Top-Two” seeks to repeal Proposition 14, the 2010 voter-approved reform that created California’s nonpartisan Top Two primary. Today, like in Alaska, voters can vote for whomever they want, regardless of their party preference.
The difference between the two systems is that in California, 2 candidates advance instead of 4. However, the authors of Prop 14, the Independent Voter Project (IVP), and More Choice California support expanding to a system similar to Alaska.
The California attorney general’s circulating summary says the initiative would repeal that system and require the legislature to establish partisan primaries in which each party’s winning candidate advances to November.
IVP and More Choice argue that description still leaves out the most important consequence.
In a July 21 letter to Attorney General Rob Bonta, they said voters need to know that the initiative would not merely change how candidates advance. It would eliminate the constitutional structure that guarantees every voter access to the primary.
Like in Alaska, Undo the Top Two seeks to return to a primary system in which the parties can decide who can and cannot participate.
The Supreme Court held in California Democratic Party v. Jones (2000) that when an election selects a political party’s nominee, the state cannot force that party to associate with nonmembers. It made a critical distinction between these types of partisan nomination contests from a nonpartisan primary in which voters are not selecting party nominees.
That means California lawmakers could create an open or semi-open system after Top Two is repealed. But, IVP argues, they could no longer guarantee the universal access voters have today if political parties objected.
In both Alaska and California, voters are being asked to repeal nonpartisan primaries founded on the fundamental principle that the right to vote derives from citizenship, not from joining a political party. All citizens deserve an equal vote, including independent voters.
When party insiders try to repeal these systems, reform advocates assert that simply saying a measure “restores political party primaries” doesn’t tell voters enough — because what is at stake is much deeper than that. What’s at stake is their right to vote.
In Alaska, the Supreme Court has decided that such fine print isn’t needed. California may be the next place where that question gets tested.
Alaska Is Voting on More Than Ranked Choice Voting. It’s Voting on Who Gets to Vote is republished as part of The Fulcrum’s partnership with IVN and the Latino News Network to expand voter‑first journalism and strengthen public‑centered coverage of democracy.
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Why do Americans respond so differently to hard history lessons? A look at the three psychological mindsets driving the patriotism debate — and a path past it.
Lighthouse Films/Getty Images
“They Hate America”: Patriotism in the Face of Historical Updates
Sep 16, 2026
I happened upon a civil discussion blog and read a post by a man who said he was happy to report that when he attended a panel discussion about teaching patriotism in the schools, all went well. He said that’s because most of the people in the bridging organization that hosted the event are “pretty patriotic.” He clarified that by writing, “None of the type of bad actors (and there are many) who want to teach kids to hate America and Western Civilization were represented.”
Someone made a comment about why we can’t incorporate historical change into curriculum and objected to the notion that a segment of the population wants to teach kids to hate America. The man who posted cited what he believes is proof. A last commenter simply input the emoji for a sleeping person, as though the argument was boring or unimportant.
As a journalist who’s been following the growing Common Ground Movement closely for the last two years, the above scenario is the kind that captivates me most and best demonstrates our current conundrum: our mindsets lead to polarization, yet understanding those mindsets can lead to depolarization.
In this particular case, the online comments demonstrated the three distinct responses we Americans seem to have when confronted by less than savory historical research and insights that challenge our traditional narratives and ignite arguments about patriotism:
- I’m a patriotic American who’s disturbed by the revelations and believes it’s my duty to incorporate the knowledge going forward, even if that means no longer celebrating traditional holidays, like Thanksgiving, in the same way.
- I’m a patriotic American who understands the information, but doesn’t care one way or the other because all of history throughout the world includes unpalatable information and characters, and you’re naive to think otherwise.
- I’m a patriotic American who believes the information is both questionable and/or biased, and more importantly, damaging to our country, which is why I don’t believe it should be taught in school or exhibited in museums.
Despite the opening sentiment, each group feels those in the other groups are unpatriotic, either because they adopt information too readily, appear disengaged, or are unwilling to accept unpleasant information.
According to cognitive empathy, if we Americans learn the psychology behind those three responses, we’ll understand ourselves better, be less likely to label fellow Americans as unpatriotic, and be more likely to consider one another’s point of view.
Those Who Ingest New Information
The first statement — “I’m a patriotic American who’s disturbed by the revelations and believe it’s my duty to incorporate the knowledge going forward, even if that means no longer celebrating traditional holidays, like Thanksgiving, in the same way.” — reflects those of us who practice what psychologists sometimes call constructive patriotism (“The Psychology of Patriotism,” The American Psychological Association). We express our patriotism through a willingness to confront our country’s flaws and behave according to those updates for the following reasons:
New information brings new moral reckoning: We encounter facts that conflict with the narrative we were taught and feel an obligation to update our beliefs and behavior.
Identity shift rather than identity rejection: Rather than abandon our identity as Americans, we adopt a more complex version of it, one that maintains an attachment to our country while acknowledging harm has been done.
Resolving cognitive conflict through action: Cognitive dissonance is when we’re faced with two apparently conflicting thoughts, in this case, "I love my country" and "my country did something bad.” To resolve the conflict, we change our behavior, maybe by altering how we celebrate a holiday, so our actions are consistent with our updated knowledge.
A sense of moral duty or responsibility: We feel ethically compelled to act upon the new knowledge.
Processing the grief or loss: Those of us who experience this reaction often mourn the simpler, kinder story we may have grown up with. Adjusting a holiday tradition can help us deal with that loss.
Indifferent to the New Information
The second statement — "I got the information, but don't care one way or the other because all of history everywhere in the world includes unpalatable information and characters, and you're naive to think otherwise." — reflects a historical relativism mindset in which we express our patriotism by trying to put negativity into perspective.
A coping strategy: We don’t deny the facts, but instead see America's flaws as matching those of a universal pattern. That, and judging what happened in the past, is both naive and unfair because we didn’t live during that time and so don’t understand the morals, events, and attitudes.
Emotional distance rather than moral evasion: We don’t refute the facts, but instead keep ourselves emotionally distant from them. That protects us from absorbing every historical wrong, which is exhausting.
A stability-first angle: This response allows us to maintain both our patriotism and our past behaviors. If new information is discovered, we’ll note it but won’t feel compelled to throw out our beloved traditions.
A sense of sophistication: If we assume others are being naive, we can view moral outrage at historical wrongdoing as a sign of inexperience or idealism, whereas acceptance implies maturity.
Minimal reckoning: By viewing history through a lens of “every country did bad things,” we can avoid deeper engagement with, or acknowledgment of, the historical information, even though we accept it as real.
Distrust and/or Rejection of the Information
The third statement — "I believe the information is both questionable and/or biased, and more importantly, damaging to our country, and therefore I don't believe it should be taught." — involves these psychological components.
Perception of threat: We find the information not only unwelcome, but dangerous enough to cause real social or civic damage.
Skepticism provides protection: If we question or reject the information itself, we avoid confronting the subject directly. Questioning makes sense, because we live in a disinformation era where people find facts to support their views and all messaging is slanted.
Loyalty first: We demonstrate our loyalty to group cohesion and shared national narrative first over historical accuracy. Whoever undermines the original narrative weakens our country’s stability, especially in the eyes of our enemies.
Fear of erosion: Accepting one wrongdoing could lead to a rush of more negative research that undermines our self-respect as Americans. The best thing to do is prevent the slide.
A "true" patriot: We fulfill a duty by protecting the collective story from what we view as dangerous agenda-driven revisionism.
Conclusion
These three psychological postures typically show up in America's current cultural and educational debates surrounding:
- traditional celebrations such as Thanksgiving and Columbus Day
- any changes to the curriculum of U.S. history, especially regarding: slavery and its legacy; Indigenous history; the naming of monuments and institutions; the framing of military and foreign-policy history; critical race theory; the 1619 Project; AP African American Studies
By recognizing the three mindsets, however, we can have more substantive discussions about the actual historical insights and proposed changes.
Those of us arguing for curriculum change may not be trying to make kids "hate America.” Instead, we may be operating from the belief that moral reckoning is an act of patriotism rather than a betrayal of it. Those of us resisting curriculum change may not be avoiding truth out of ignorance, but instead operating out of genuine concern about narrative erosion and social cohesion. And those of us who shrug at the whole debate aren’t necessarily complacent. We may simply have made peace with historical complexity in a way that any particular current debate doesn’t feel urgent.
If that kind of understanding seems impossible in our current culture, the good news is that there are numerous cases in which citizens, organizations, and government officials have been successful at incorporating historical changes.
Consider that for decades, the history of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre — the destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, a prosperous Black neighborhood in Oklahoma — was actively suppressed.
In the 1990s, the state created a commission to collect evidence from newspapers, survivor interviews, death certificates, photographs, and other sources that resulted in a documented historical record. The public was brought into the debate. Convinced of the historical facts, in 2008, the Tulsa public school system incorporated the historical event into the social studies curriculum.
The process wasn’t fast, but it did allow people of all three mindsets, with the time, information, and opportunity to come to terms with American history in a way that took patriotism out of the equation.
Writer and journalist Martha Engber is the host of Vigilant Positivity, a blog and YouTube channel that covers the Common Ground Movement.
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