Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Wisconsin bill to end partisan gerrymandering picks up Republican support

Wisconsin bill to end partisan gerrymandering picks up Republican support

The state Assembly district lines in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Legislature

A newly bipartisan group of Wisconsin legislators is pushing a bill to get politicians out of the business of drawing the state's electoral maps. It's the first such concerted move in a state capital since the Supreme Court last month gave a constitutional green light to unlimited partisan gerrymandering.

The effort still faces long odds in Madison, where Republicans have a solid hold on the Legislature thanks to their aggressive drawing of boundaries after the last census.

Their maps allowed the GOP to maintain a lopsided 63-36 majority in the state House in last year's election, and a 19-14 edge in the state Senate, even though Democrats won 53 percent of the cumulative legislative vote statewide.

A federal lawsuit — in which Democrats challenged those maps as unconstitutionally limiting their free speech and equal protection rights — was effectively killed by the Supreme Court's ruling in June that federal courts have no power to police political power plays in districting.

The decision leaves that power to voter referenda, state legislatures such as Wisconsin's or state courts like the one now considering a challenge to North Carolina's map under the state constitution.


Before that decision, a pair of senior Democrats in Wisconsin had introduced a measure that would have turned the coming round of state legislative cartography, after next year's census, over to civil servants under the oversight of a commission without any partisan majority. At a news conference Tuesday, they announced the support of three GOP assemblymen who represent competitive districts.

"We can no longer count on anyone else to do it for us. If we want fair and competitive elections, we must all do the work," state Sen. Dave Hansen said. "We now have what we truly can call a bipartisan bill. The time is right. The time is now."

But the GOP Assembly speaker, Robin Vos, vowed to oppose any effort to hand over legislative mapmaking to "an unelected, unaccountable board of bureaucrats appointed by politicians."

The current boundaries, which Scott Walker approved as a new GOP governor eight years ago, packed Democratic voters into a relatively few state legislative districts in Milwaukee and Madison in order to minimize their influence across the suburbs and rural areas.

The congressional map was similarly drawn, and so the GOP has regularly won in five of the eight districts — including last fall, when the party got just 45 percent of the statewide vote for House candidates.

Walker is now in charge of a group coordinating the Republican efforts to maximize their congressional and state legislative power in maps drawn for the next decade.

Read More

Is Bombing Iran Deja Vu All Over Again?

The B-2 "Spirit" Stealth Bomber flys over the 136th Rose Parade Presented By Honda on Jan. 1, 2025, in Pasadena, California. (Jerod Harris/Getty Images/TNS)

Jerod Harris/Getty Images/TNS)

Is Bombing Iran Deja Vu All Over Again?

After a short and successful war with Iraq, President George H.W. Bush claimed in 1991 that “the ghosts of Vietnam have been laid to rest beneath the sands of the Arabian desert.” Bush was referring to what was commonly called the “Vietnam syndrome.” The idea was that the Vietnam War had so scarred the American psyche that we forever lost confidence in American power.

The elder President Bush was partially right. The first Iraq war was certainly popular. And his successor, President Clinton, used American power — in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere — with the general approval of the media and the public.

Keep ReadingShow less
Conspiratorial Thinking Isn’t Growing–Its Consequences Are
a close up of a typewriter with the word conspiracy on it

Conspiratorial Thinking Isn’t Growing–Its Consequences Are

The Comet Ping Pong Pizzagate shooting, the plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and a man’s livestreamed beheading of his father last year were all fueled by conspiracy theories. But while the headlines suggest that conspiratorial thinking is on the rise, this is not the case. Research points to no increase in conspiratorial thinking. Still, to a more dangerous reality: the conspiracies taking hold and being amplified by political ideologues are increasingly correlated with violence against particular groups. Fortunately, promising new research points to actions we can take to reduce conspiratorial thinking in communities across the US.

Some journalists claim that this is “a golden age of conspiracy theories,” and the public agrees. As of 2022, 59% of Americans think that people are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories today than 25 years ago, and 73% of Americans think conspiracy theories are “out of control.” Most blame this perceived increase on the role of social media and the internet.

Keep ReadingShow less
Why a College Degree No Longer Guarantees a Good Job
woman wearing academic cap and dress selective focus photography
Photo by MD Duran on Unsplash

Why a College Degree No Longer Guarantees a Good Job

A college education used to be considered, along with homeownership, one of the key pillars of the American Dream. Is that still the case? Recent experiences of college graduates seeking employment raise questions about whether a university diploma remains the best pathway to pursuing happiness, as it once was.

Consider the case of recent grad Lohanny Santo, whose TikTok video went viral with over 3.6 million “likes” as she broke down in tears and vented her frustration over her inability to find even a minimum wage job. That was despite her dual degrees from Pace University and her ability to speak three languages. John York, a 24-year-old with a master’s degree in math from New York University, writes that “it feels like I am screaming into the void with each application I am filling out.”

Keep ReadingShow less