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The NYC Charter Revision Commission (CRC) will hold its final meeting on July 21 to decide what reforms to city policy will appear on the November ballot. However, one proposal will not be on the commission’s docket – open primaries.

Back in November, DC voters overwhelmingly approved Initiative 83, a measure that called for semi-open primaries and ranked choice voting (RCV) in all city elections. The problem – the DC City Council has yet to fully fund it.

New York City’s Charter Revision Commission (CRC) is considering a proposal to adopt a nonpartisan “Top Two” open primary system, which would allow the city’s 1.1 million independent voters to cast a ballot in primary elections they pay for.

U.S. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) recently announced his retirement from Congress, but the reasons he cites for his departure underscore a growing problem in Washington -- specifically, a rejection of problem solving in favor of division, partisan gamesmanship, and provocation.

Two Oklahoma veterans – one a pediatrician, the other a U.S. Coast Guard commander – have filed a legal challenge to SB 1027 in Oklahoma, a law they say unconstitutionally targets their statewide citizen initiative to implement open primaries, State Question 836 (SQ 836).

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled June 30 that federal prison officers and officials cannot be sued by an inmate who accused them of excessive force during a 2021 incident, delivering a victory for federal corrections personnel concerned about rising legal exposure for doing their jobs.

For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American physicians freely prescribed cannabis to treat a wide range of ailments. But by the mid-twentieth century, federal officials were laying the groundwork for a sweeping criminal crackdown. Cannabis would ultimately be classified as a Schedule I substance, placed alongside heroin and LSD, and transformed into a political weapon that shaped American policy for the next six decades.

A news item in recent days that was overshadowed in the media by SCOTUS and the One Big Beautiful Budget Bill was a US-brokered peace agreement that was signed between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – which if it holds will end a conflict between the two countries that has killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

In a late-session vote last week, House Republicans advanced a sweeping change to federal hemp policy that could outlaw a wide range of intoxicating hemp products, sometimes referred to as “gas station weed,” as the hemp Farm Bill loopholes become a major policy issue in many states, including California, Tennessee and Texas.

President Donald Trump won another term in the Oval Office thanks to the support of independent voters. However, a new poll commissioned by The Independent Center shows independents aren’t happy with Trump's failure deliver on the economic and political promises that led them to swing in his favor in November.