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DC voting rights advocate Lisa D.T. Rice criticized the DC City Council for failing to fund Initiative 83’s semi-open primary system, leaving 85,000 independent voters unable to participate in taxpayer-funded primaries despite overwhelming voter approval in 2024.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Lisa D.T. Rice spoke before the DC City Council during a Budget Oversight Hearing on May 1 to talk about Initiative 83, the semi-open primary and ranked choice voting measure she proposed that was approved by 73% of voters in 2024.
- YouTube youtu.be
Two years later, as DC residents prepare to vote in the 2026 primaries, 85,000 independent voters are still locked out of these taxpayer-funded elections because the city council decided the will of the people didn’t matter.
A semi-open primary would allow registered independents the opportunity to pick a Republican or Democratic ballot while registered party members would have to vote in their respective party’s primary.
Instead, the Democratic majority voted only to fund ranked choice voting. DC voters took note of this slight against their vote, as did major news publications like The Washington Post, which continues to criticize council members.
Just check out the opinion piece where the Post’s editorial board asks, “Why are DC Dems afraid of independent voters?”
“When I became an independent, I didn’t realize I would be disenfranchised,” said Rice. Our friends at Open Primaries posted her testimony on YouTube (see above).
“Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that to exercise the sacred right to vote, you must belong to a political party. The Republican and Democratic Parties didn’t even exist at the founding of our nation, and yet they have made a fundamental American right contingent on joining one of these private clubs.”
One of the main excuses the council has made for not funding open primaries is the cost. Rice explained that it would cost $1 million to implement a semi-open primary, most of which would go toward paper (i.e. mailers, ballots, and voter registration cards).
For context, $1 million represents not even a percent of the city’s multi-billion-dollar budget.
“We would not tell people with disabilities that it is too expensive for them to vote,” Rice remarked. “We would not accept it if someone told us they could not afford enough ballots for black voters, and we should not accept that excuse for Initiative 83.”
She added that the irony is not lost on her that while Democratic leaders across the country decry the Supreme Court’s recent decision to limit section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, DC Democrats are “fighting tooth and nail” to keep her from voting.
Rice closed out her testimony challenging members of the Council to stand by their words when they say they will defend DC voters and their right to vote. “Which is it? Are the outcomes of our local elections sacred and worthy of respect from elected officials – or not?”
Check out her full testimony above.
“We Can’t Afford It” Is Never an Acceptable Excuse To Deny Independents a Vote was originally published by Independent Voter News and is republished with permission.
Americans are questioning whether they have enough resources and support to raise a family in the nation's current political landscape. Julie Roland examines the contradictions of "pro-family" politics in America today and the kind of care mothers are owed to safely and successfully raise children.
My mother, who died of breast cancer when I was 18, had me when she was 32. This past Sunday, I turned 33, childless. As I officially fall behind her timeline, with no plans to have kids anytime soon, I look at the landscape of 2026 America and have to ask: Who can blame me?
The decision to start a family is a difficult one. J.D. Vance said on his first day as Vice President that he wants “more babies in America,” but many Americans simply can’t afford to have kids anymore. Perhaps that’s one reason why this administration is offering $5,000 “baby bonuses” just to incentivize birth, while also banning abortion in every way they can. But becoming a mother should be a choice. I was the result of an unplanned pregnancy–and I’m lucky my mom decided to have me and that she turned out to be the best mom ever–but as Miriam Rabkin, MD, MPH, put it: “if you want mom to be happy and healthy, she needs access to contraception so she can choose if and when to get pregnant!” Instead, this administration seems to think that if women won’t elect to have children, they should try paying them, and if that doesn’t work, then they should just force them.
The hypocrisy of the administration’s “pro-life” stance is made plain in the federal budget. While the administration ignores calls for federally mandated paid family leave (a basic standard in almost every other developed nation), it has found $38.3 billion to acquire and retrofit warehouses into massive immigration detention centers. We are told there is no money to support the 40% of American births covered by Medicaid, which faces $1 trillion in proposed cuts, yet there is an endless well of funding for a $170 billion immigration enforcement machine, where pregnant women have been thrown behind bars under terrible conditions.
Since July 2025, the administration has been funneling all pregnant unaccompanied minors—some as young as 13—into a single facility in San Benito, Texas. Internal whistleblowers and journalists have revealed that at least half of these girls are pregnant as a result of rape. Instead of receiving trauma-informed, specialized obstetric care, they are being held in a facility that lacks a single on-site doctor or OB-GYN, located hours away from specialized medical centers. The U.S. already ranks 55th in maternal mortality, the worst among wealthy nations. By sending these girls to Texas, where abortion is banned even when the mother’s life is at risk, the administration is effectively forcing children to carry the pregnancies of their rapists to term in cramped, ill-equipped warehouses, in a state where maternal deaths have spiked by 56%.
The Trump regime’s pro-family rhetoric masks a brutal reality for those actually bearing and raising children. Even outside of detention centers, motherhood in this country is a more harrowing experience than it has been in a long time. For Black mothers, maternal mortality is a catastrophe, with Black women three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women (Trump has moved to cancel NIH grants researching these very disparities). On Mother’s Day, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched Moms.gov, a digital portal promising to make moms healthy again that reads more like an attempt to distract from a lethal policy record. But surely, deporting breastfeeding mothers and ignoring the 16 known miscarriages that occurred in ICE detention just last year is making America neither healthy nor great.
MAHA’s virtue-signaling website pretends to celebrate motherhood while Trump sabotages the care that keeps them and their children alive. Secretary of HHS Kennedy has personally overseen the exclusion of healthy pregnant women from COVID-19 booster recommendations and has convinced expecting mothers to avoid Tylenol by lying to them about its connection to autism. He’s also behind the decisions that have put the U.S. on the verge of losing its 26-year-old measles elimination status. When asked at a Senate committee hearing if he agreed that “89% of children who died from flu were unvaccinated,” Kennedy replied that he didn’t know the exact number. 89% is the exact number. But don’t worry, moms, they made you a website.
Speaking of people misusing their unearned platforms, what was up with Melania’s op-ed in the Washington Post? Most readers have called the First Lady’s words a disgrace; she essentially called for the restoration of a time before feminism, criticizing mothers who prioritize their careers over family. Apparently, the White House thought it was a good idea to have a billionaire’s wife attempt to shame working mothers.
If the Trump regime truly valued mothers, it would invest in their survival, not their detention. It would fund parental leave, not cages. Until then, Moms.gov and Melania’s manifesto are reminders that we have a government that loves to hype up the idea of a mother (as a caretaker, a woman “whose unconditional love steadies us through every season of life,” and a supplementary character), but has total contempt for the person and the reality of the role.
Policy reform that prioritizes moms prioritizes our nation’s future. Moms are on the front lines, raising the next generation, and our country should be supporting women in this critical mission. Instead, this government’s agenda has been more of an assault. We as a community must call out the hypocrisy and not become desensitized to the abuse. We must organize and fight back. We have the numbers—the only people on this planet are mothers and their children. We wouldn’t be here without moms. Let’s pay it forward.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.
Religious leaders hold a press conference at the Episcopal Church Center to outline plans for implementing the recommendations of President Johnson's riot commission. From the left are Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, president of Inter-Religious Foundation for Community Organizations; Rev. Albert Cleage Jr., pastor of Detroit's Central Congregational Church; Rev., John Hines, co-chairman of Operation connection, and Rabbi Abraham Heschel, of New York's Jewish Theological Seminary.
An aggressor shouting “Free Palestine” choked a 32-year-old Jewish man near Adas Torah synagogue recently in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood in LA.
This episode, following on the heels of thousands more, is a stark reminder that the surge of antisemitism in the U.S. continues unabated.
On the same day, the Supreme Court of the United States rolled back a major tenet of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that had supported Black voters' rights in Louisiana.
The surge in racism and antisemitism is discouraging after all the efforts to bring together the Black and Jewish communities, a movement championed by the late Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., who died earlier this year.
I saw Jackson’s allyship with Jewish leaders up close. My late husband, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, was then Director of Interreligious Relations at the American Jewish Committee. He was among those with whom Jesse Jackson engaged in the wake of the “Hymietown” scandal.
Rather than retreat into their corners, hurling accusations at each other, they shared a stage at the Queens College People-to-People program. Ignoring violent threats and unruly demonstrators outside, they each acknowledged the issues that divided them and affirmed the importance of the Black-Jewish allyship, which both deeply valued. Both had walked the walk in support of each other’s communities, and that strong foundation held, despite the controversy.
Unfortunately, that foundation seems to be crumbling–at least among younger Blacks and Jews. Yet, that allyship is more urgently needed than at any time since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Today, old and new issues threaten both communities: voting rights, white supremacy, hate speech, hate crime, replacement theory, immigration, gerrymandering, minority status, reproductive health and rights, and Christian nationalism.
There are far fewer issues that divide us: white privilege, affirmative action, antisemitism, and Israel/Palestine.
The first divisive factor ignores the fact that as much as 15% of the Jewish community in America is comprised of Jews of color. Valid research has yet to be done outside the U.S., but an educated guess is that there are hundreds of thousands of additional Jews of color worldwide. As such, Blacks and Jews are bound together by intermarriage, conversion, and ethnicity.
Affirmative action quotas can evoke opposite responses in Jews and Blacks. For Jews, quotas have historically meant exclusion. For Blacks, they are the road to inclusion.
Nevertheless, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-based admissions in a 2023 ruling, Jewish organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, and the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, condemned the decision; and Jews have generally favored affirmative action.
As for antisemitism, many Jews tend to forget that Black Americans endorsed the United Nations resolution calling for the establishment of the State of Israel in 1947. Harvard University Professor Ralph Bunche won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for his mediation efforts following Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. He was the first Black American to win the prize.
When Israel airlifted to safety 14,000 Black Jews from Ethiopia in Operation Solomon in 1991, 36 Black mayors across the U.S endorsed that effort.
Black organizations joined the fight to free three million oppressed Jews in the Soviet Union.
The National Urban League supported the repeal of the “Zionism is racism” resolution at the United Nations in 1991.
In 1999, Jesse Jackson worked for the release of 13 Iranian Jews who had been arrested and charged as Zionist spies.
All of these acts of support for Jews and Israel were done by older generations of Blacks. It’s quite a different story for the younger generation.
A 2023 study by Eitan Hersh and Laura Royden in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics, with an oversample of 18–30-year-olds, revealed that younger Black adults are a particularly high-risk subgroup for antisemitic attitudes, relative both to white youth and to older Americans. Unlike many other prejudices, antisemitism is not lower among younger minority cohorts.
Earlier studies showed similar results, attributed to the rise of Black nationalist and Third-Worldist ideologies that cast Jews/Zionism as colonial or racist forces. This led to binary thinking that cast people as either pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, as if they were mutually exclusive. And it denied the indigeneity of Jews to Israel.
This brings us to the elephant in the room: Israel.
Israel has been weaponized as a wedge issue to separate the Black and Jewish communities. But Israel is not relevant to the domestic issues that threaten it. To the extent that it has become a litmus test for mutual support, the obsession with Israel undermines both groups’ interests.
Jews need to stop demanding that Blacks loudly proclaim their support for Israel in order to gain Jewish support. And Blacks need to stop expecting Jews to renounce their Zionism in order to deserve their support.
As painful as it is for each side to put these litmus tests aside, they are beside the point when it comes to dealing with urgent domestic issues that threaten both communities.
Blacks and Jews are both under attack by haters and extremists. But if both groups remain in their silos, each is vulnerable to forces that divide them in pursuit of agendas that undermine all.
There is a different model for allyship. Put aside litmus tests on issues that disrupt the ability to work together.
Instead of advocating for each other, focus on issues that impact both communities in common. The former has led to each community feeling abandoned by the other at key moments. If people coalesce around issues in which both have a big stake, they will be helping everyone by working together on shared interests.
Dr. Georgette Bennett is the founder and president of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding and founder and Chair of the Multifaith Alliance. She is the author of Thou Shalt Not Stand Idly By, and Half-Jew Full Life, and co-author of Religicide.
The 1971 Powell Memo, the "Second Gilded Age," and Project 2025 can be viewed as interconnected stages of a long-term corporate and conservative project to reshape American society, prioritizing free-market capitalism, deregulation, and concentrated wealth. The Powell Memo provided the initial strategy, the Second Gilded Age represents its outcome, and Project 2025 serves as the current blueprint to solidify this structure for future generations.
Here is the connection between these three elements:
The 1971 Powell Memo (The Strategy) - Aggressive corporate lobbying, building think tanks (Heritage), court takeovers.
The Goal: It was a call to arms for corporate America to reverse what Powell viewed as a growing, dangerous antipathy toward the free enterprise system, citing environmentalism, consumer protection, and liberal academia.
The Strategy: Powell recommended a coordinated, well-funded effort to influence politics, education, media, and the courts. He suggested creating think tanks, monitoring textbooks, and aggressively engaging in judicial lobbying.
Result: It galvanized corporate spending, leading to the creation of the Business Roundtable and funding for organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute.
Authored by Lewis Powell (shortly before his appointment to the Supreme Court) for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, this confidential memo was titled "Attack on American Free Enterprise System".
The Second Gilded Age (The Outcome) - Extreme inequality, Citizens United, deregulation, flattening wages.
The decades following the memo saw a significant shift in political and economic power, described by experts as a "second Gilded Age", a time of extreme income inequality and political influence concentrated at the top.
Wealth Concentration: The top 0.1% saw income growth while median wages flattened. The wealth of the top 10% skyrocketed, similar to the late 19th-century Gilded Age.
Corporate Captive Politics: Through increased lobbying and the legal restructuring of campaign finance—specifically the Citizens United v. FEC decision—corporations gained unprecedented ability to influence elections and policy.
Neoliberalism: The "dogma of neoliberalism" (tax cuts, deregulation, privatization) became difficult to challenge in politics or media, just as the Powell Memo envisioned.
Project 2025 (The Finalization) - Consolidating power, dismantling agencies, enforcing corporate ideology.
Project 2025, organized by the Heritage Foundation—one of the think tanks founded in the wake of the Powell Memo, is a modern, comprehensive update to the strategies laid out in 1971.
Dismantling the Administrative State: It aims to "bring the Administrative State to heel" by gutting federal agencies like the EPA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Education, and by removing environmental and labor regulations.
Unitary Executive Theory: It proposes expanding presidential control over the Department of Justice, allowing the executive branch to solidify corporate-friendly policies without congressional oversight.
Cultural and Social Shift: It aims to "defang and defund" progressive movements ("woke culture warriors") by banning DEI programs and ending certain abortion access, aligning with Powell’s desire to challenge "disquieting voices" and "liberal concessions".
Project 2025 is the 21st-century culmination of a 50-year-old initiative to secure corporate and conservative dominance over the American economic and political system.
The “Gilded Age” was a rehearsal for our current "Second Gilded Age," as was Trump-45’s term a rehearsal for the Trump-47 term.
Path Forward: the “Gilded Age” (roughly 1870–1900) went on life support with a bloodbath at the ballot box in the 1894 midterm election, when conservatives lost more than 100 seats in Congress, the largest single turnover of power in American history. The Progressive Era, a period of widespread social activism and political reform, followed, spanning into the 1920s.
Our challenge recovering from the "Second Gilded Age" (1980s to the present) will be much more challenging; exceedingly more urgent. In 1894, the U.S. national debt was approximately 7% of gross domestic product (GDP). As of early 2026, the U.S. national debt is 122% to 125% of GDP. This situation has been exacerbated since 2000, when the U.S. national debt as a percentage of GDP was 33% to 35%. Americans can attribute this worsening situation to two non-popular vote presidents, Bush-43 and Trump-45. Directly, during their terms, and indirectly, with the aftermath of the 2008 Great recession and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
From a fiscal standpoint, America can ill afford another non-popular vote president. While the Constitution allows state legislatures to determine the method of elector selection, the Framers did not mandate the winner-take-all (WTA) Electoral College system currently used by 48 states. This system concentrates campaign attention on a few "swing states" while rendering millions of votes in "safe states" effectively irrelevant.
"Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come".-- Victor Hugo (1802-1885). With regard to the Electoral College, that idea is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC).
NPVIC is an agreement among U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their electoral votes to the presidential ticket that wins the overall popular vote in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. It is considered a pragmatic, voluntary state-based initiative because it aims to ensure the winner of the national popular vote wins the presidency without requiring a constitutional amendment, operating instead within the existing Electoral College framework by utilizing states' constitutional authority to appoint electors. If enough states join the NPVIC to reach 270 electoral votes, the United States will effectively shift from a winner-take-all (WTA) regime to a national popular vote system for electing the President.
With Virginia’s adoption, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has been adopted by eighteen states and the District of Columbia, which collectively hold 222 electoral votes. The compact requires 270 electoral votes (a majority of the 538 total) to take effect. It currently needs forty-eight more electoral votes to become active.
In 2026, NPVIC will be a relevant issue in several state elections, particularly in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. As the compact needs 48 more electoral votes to reach the 270-vote threshold, these purple or contested states are key battlegrounds where legislative control could determine whether they join the 19 jurisdictions already signed on.
Hugh J. Campbell, Jr., CPA, is a Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) professional and a student of W. Edwards Deming, the American statistician often credited as the catalyst for the Japanese economic miracle after WWII.
Some MAGA loyalists have turned on Trump. Why the rest haven’t