Articles by Ryan Schuette

Since last week over twelve hundred protesters have subjected themselves to arrest outside the U.S. Capitol building, with thousands more pledging their willingness to join them. Their goal? To draw attention to widespread fears about corruption and the influence of money in American politics. The organization behind the nonviolent protests, Democracy Spring, has been arranging mass sit-ins outside the Capitol rotunda since last Monday. The movement’s leaders also held related festivities over...

If the 2016 presidential election is proving anything, it’s that voters are not happy with the state of their union. On the left and right, we’re seeing insurgents give establishment candidates a run for their money. Democrats are breaking from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vermont), a longtime independent and self-declared democratic socialist. Republicans are meanwhile finding it difficult to prevent real-estate billionaire Donald Trump from locking up th...

The presidential election is already in full swing, and you’re hearing candidates predictably talk about how they’ll change Washington for the better. No, for real this time. No, for real, for real. Listen to a few of these men and women, and you’ll hear that our nation’s capital is dysfunctional because their party isn’t in power.But our government is dysfunctional for other reasons—and not because one party can’t meet its own litmus tests or push through enough pet policies. On paper, the Unit...

Americans are known for patting themselves on the back — a lot. History texts routinely teach that the Constitution is our civic religion. Certainly, in my role as an IVN independent author, I often see articles that parade our Constitution as an irrevocable victory and self-evident right. Our founding document is neither a victory nor a right. It’s a scrap of paper with some basic governing principles, and about as effective as we consider it. You needn’t look far to see that our observance of...

Taxpayer-funded party primaries may soon be a thing of the past in Mississippi, if a recent report from a state-sponsored study group means anything. Convened by Mississippi’s secretary of state, the 50-member panel endorsed the top-two model for primary elections in mid-January, but stopped short of backing any immediate change for fear that it could confuse election workers. As a group, the panel didn’t have any formal legislative or policymaking authority, so any change in how Mississippia...

In late October, Warner Bros. and two other studios premiered Interstellar, a blockbuster science-fiction film by award-winning director Christopher Nolan that chronicles the odyssey of a team of NASA astronauts in their search for a habitable planet as Earth succumbs to the death knells of crop blight, dust storms, and climate change. What some critics say is extraordinary about the film — which RottenTomatoes.com called “thought-provoking” and “visually resplendent,” even if a little dense — ...

WASHINGTON, D.C.— A federal official with the nation’s top auto safety regulator vowed at a House subcommittee hearing on Wednesday that the agency would consider every legal measure available against a Japanese auto parts supplier suspected of providing car manufacturers with faulty airbags that investigators have linked to the deaths of at least five people, four of them Americans. David Friedman, deputy administrator for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, told lawmakers that...

U.S. officials appeared to be closer on Wednesday to clinching an agreement with Iran that would stop the country from developing nuclear weapons, signs of progress welcome in a region that continues to know extreme violence as ISIS militants step up their attacks.Jeff Rathke, a spokesperson for the State Department, acknowledged at a press briefing early in the afternoon that bilateral talks had taken place on Wednesday, with more to follow on Thursday in Paris, where Secretary of State John Ke...

Registered nurses organized strikes across the country on Wednesday to protest care standards in the wake of the Ebola crisis, even as some hospitals wrangled with union members over their pensions, pay, and collective bargaining rights. National Nurses United, the Maryland-based union responsible for organizing the demonstrations, laid claim to 100,000 nurses joining protests over prevention and care standards nationwide.“The lack of concern for nurses and patients in a world where corporation...