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By Sam Zeno

Just weeks ago, on August 16, 2024, the Biden-Harris administration utilized the Antiquities Act to formally designate the Springfield 1908 Race Riot National Monument in Illinois, where one of the most violent race riots in U.S. history occurred. Last year, President Joe Biden used the same tool to protect nearly 1 million acres of public lands sacred to Tribes in the Grand Canyon watershed, designated as Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument. Protecting critical histories and landscapes such as these is one of many essential uses of the Antiquities Act.

Signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, the Antiquities Act was the first U.S. law passed for the purpose of protecting cultural and natural resources with historic or scientific value on public lands. The Antiquities Act grants the president the authority to designate national monuments. ​- CLICK STORY TO READ MORE

By Tymoni Correa-Buntley

Project 2025, officially titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, is an extremist blueprint crafted by the Heritage Foundation to guide a far-right presidential administration. This 900-page manifesto outlines sweeping policy proposals that would upend nearly every aspect of American life. At its core,

Project 2025 seeks to unravel the system of checks and balances that has been foundational to American democracy for nearly 250 years. Far from a fringe idea, the authoritarian playbook is already influencing state policies in places that are seeing attacks on reproductive rights, worker protections, and public safety. From stripping away women’s rights to dismantling union efforts, Project 2025 paints a disturbing picture of the future that the far right envisions for our country. Here are answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about Project 2025.

1. What’s Project 2025’s goal? ​-- CLICK STORY TO READ MORE

By Mia Ives-Rublee, Alex Cogan & Rebecca Mears

Authors’ note: The disability community is rapidly evolving to use identity-first language in place of person-first language. This is because it views disability as being a core component of identity, much like race and gender. Some members of the community, such as people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, prefer person-first language. In this column, the terms are used interchangeably.

Disabled Americans continue to experience barriers to the ballot box. These barriers can include polling places that are not physically accessible, failure of polling locations to provide auxiliary aids and services for individuals with vision or hearing loss, lack of accessible voting machines and staff trained in the use of such machines, and more. The good news is that during the last presidential election, in 2020, disabled people participated in record numbers. Nearly 62 percent of disabled voters participated in 2020 compared with nearly 56 percent in 2016.

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By Kevin DeGood, Christian Weller, David Ballard

The most effective way to solve America’s severe housing affordability crisis is to undertake a bold federal program of social housing construction that will deliver millions of new affordable, self-sustaining housing units located in opportunity-rich areas.

Introduction and summary

The United States faces a persistent and serious housing affordability crisis that demands bold action to solve. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 21.8 million households spend at least 30 percent of their monthly income on rent, and within this group, 11.2 million spend at least 50 percent on rent.1 This means that roughly 48 percent of the 45 million households that rent are considered cost burdened, with a distressingly high share facing an extreme cost burden.2 And monthly rental costs are not the only challenge. For too many Americans, the rapidly rising cost of health care and education has resulted in a growing student debt burden, which has crowded out money that could go toward housing. --CLICK STORY TO READ MORE

By Devon Ombres and Jeevna Sheth

This term, the right-wing supermajority on the Supreme Court will have the opportunity to resume advancing a far-right policy agenda in several consequential and politically charged cases before it. Last term, the high court continued its trend of overturning long-standing precedent to strip government of the authority to protect Americans from bad actors seize power from the elected branches of government and declare that the U.S. president is essentially above the law.

In the face of growing calls for Supreme Court reform, the court will hear cases in the coming months providing them the ability to widen the fissures in the rule of law they created in recent terms that will further weaken Americans’ civil rights, voting rights, and the freedom from being preyed upon by monied and powerful private interests. The Supreme Court is set to hear merits cases involving LGBTQ+ rights, gun violence prevention, and the authority of public agencies to address public health issues, such as electronic cigarettes, water pollution and climate change—and it has already been active on its nonmerits emergency docket known as the shadow docket.-- CLICK STORY TO READ MORE

By Greta Bedekovics, Sydney Bryant, & Alice Lillydahl

The Freedom to Vote Act (FTVA) would expand access to the ballot box for millions of Americans and ensure that all citizens can easily exercise their right to vote, regardless of their ZIP code. At the same time, this transformational voting rights legislation would strengthen election security, improve election administration and campaign finance transparency, and ban partisan gerrymandering.

The FTVA would make voting easier and more secure for 4.5 million voting-age Wisconsin citizens, including 3.2 million currently registered voters. A new report from the Center for American Progress provides analysis and statistical extrapolations to illustrate how the 2024 and subsequent election cycles would be transformed if the FTVA’s key voting policies had been enacted in 2022, when the legislation was blocked through the use of the filibuster on the U.S. Senate floor.

-- CLICK STORY TO READ MORE