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By Alan Cohen

At some point next year, Congress will need to raise the nation’s debt limit to prevent the United States from defaulting on its financial obligations. However, key House Republican leaders have recently indicated that they plan to take advantage of the need to increase the federal government’s borrowing cap to force spending cuts to Social Security and Medicare, putting these two critical programs at risk.

What is the debt limit?

Current law constrains the ability of the U.S. Department of the Treasury to issue debt to meet the government’s ongoing cash needs through a statutory ceiling called the debt limit. The Treasury cannot borrow more money than is allowed under the limit. As a result, once the debt ceiling is reached, the Treasury will not have enough revenue to meet all the obligations required under previous legislation unless Congress passes new legislation raising or suspending the debt limit. ​ .-- READ MORE

By Jordan Link

Introduction and summary

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS), its national police service and domestic security force, across the globe in ways that threaten U.S. national security interests by influencing security sector governance to undermine respect for the rule of law and human rights. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the MPS has significantly expanded its overseas activities, increasingly using security cooperation as a tool to expand its influence and shape global norms.

While the U.S. foreign policy community has focused attention on the military-to-military security cooperation activities of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), there is little public understanding of how the MPS’ overseas activities directly compete with U.S. security cooperation programs. -- READ MORE

By Peter Juul and Heba Malik

The Biden administration’s 2022 National Security Strategy puts forward three core themes: strategic competition with China and Russia the importance of domestic industrial policy and investment and a focus on climate change as a central challenge. It also contains several subsidiary themes, including food security, pandemic response efforts, combating disinformation, countering corruption, and strengthening American democracy. These key themes and subsidiary points follow from the strategy’s fundamental assumption that “the United States is strong abroad because we are strong at home.”

A brief look at the National Security Strategy itself makes these three main themes clear—and shows how they complement and build off one another. . -- READ MORE

By Nicole Lee Ndumele, Ben Olinsky, & Marcella Bombardieri

This term, the Supreme Court is hearing several cases designed to achieve the long-standing, radical right-wing agenda of prohibiting the government from using race conscious remedies to address pervasive racial injustices. This goal—which effectively seeks to reverse key protections granted by the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution—would continue a campaign by the court’s extreme majority to reverse rights, laws, and precedents that have stood for generations and pervert the intentions and explicit language of the Constitution itself. ​

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By Lauren Hoffman, Rose Khattar, Beth Almeida, & Bela Salas-Betsch

New data from the U.S. Census Bureau reveal that the gender wage gap narrowed slightly in 2021. This progress, while modest, reflects the robust economic recovery—fueled in part by the American Rescue Plan (ARP)—that saw women’s employment expand by more than 3 million jobs since the passage of the ARP in March 2021. In another win for women, the Biden administration’s transformative economic achievements—including the Inflation Reduction Act, student loan relief, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), also known as the bipartisan infrastructure law—will help alleviate many families’ and individuals’ economic pressures in myriad ways.

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In early US history, only white adult male property owners were allowed to vote. The 15th Amendment (ratified in 1870 and stipulated that men could not be denied the right to vote based on their race) and later the 19th Amendment (ratified in 1920 and granted women the right to vote) to the US Constitution set the foundation for voting rights in this nation.

Subsequent to the passage of these amendments, African Americans and others still faced discriminatory laws and practices in many parts of the country, especially the South. Poll taxes and literacy tests were used to deliberately suppress African Americans’ freedom to vote.

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