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On April 4, the governors of California and New York signed off on legislation raising their state’s minimum wages to $15 per hour. While the public may disagree about the merits of this measure and what the cumulative effects will be, there is little disagreement that states – as “laboratories of democracy” – are entitled to perform such economic experiments. After all, the first state minimum wage law was passed more than a century ago in Massachusetts in 1912, and a majority of states have mi

Just when you thought independents couldn’t face any more voter discrimination this year, they will be hit with four closed primaries in a single day on April 26. This comes a week after independents were disenfranchised by the closed New York primary on April 19,  a primary where voters were required to register with a party six months in advance and a record amount of independents were told they didn't re-register in time or were turned away from the polls. The five contests on Tuesday are C

Horror stories abound in New York after the Tuesday primaries as voters report being dropped from rolls, turned away by poll workers, and subjected to long lines in understaffed polling places. City authorities admitted that at least 125,000 voters were mysteriously purged from the polls in Brooklyn alone. The New York state attorney general’s office reported that its voter hotline had received 562 phone calls and 140 emails by Tuesday afternoon, more than five times as many complaints than dur

It's hard to believe, but Donald Trump finally said something I tend to agree wholeheartedly with -- that America is sitting on a financial time bomb waiting to explode. I don't tend to be a doomsday prediction maker, though for the past two years on IVN I have written much about the dangers lurking in the shadows of the economy: the worldwide debt crisis, China's economic meltdown, and the negatives of sustained low oil prices on the American economy (which still hasn't provided a boom like mo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9t7Q4H7efg Dr. Margaret Flowers, a Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate in Maryland, was physically ejected from a Monday Goucher College senatorial debate featuring Republican and Democratic candidates after she took the stage in defiance of a last-minute rule change that reportedly caused her to be disinvited from the event. Dramatic footage seen above captured the moment when audience members chanted “Let her speak” as she was being forced out of the buildi

From the way that Mitch McConnell and other Republicans have been talking this week, one might suspect that “the Biden Rule” is an actual thing—that it existed as a term or a concept before last Wednesday. It didn’t. The term “Biden Rule” did not exist a week ago. It has never been a thing. It was coined specifically for the press conference in which McConnell announced that the Senate would not consider President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court during their current term. "The Senate will

I feel bad for Senator Mitch McConnell. He has been placed in a no-win situation by the nomination of Merrick Garland to fill Antonin Scalia’s spot on the Supreme Court. On the one hand, Garland is about the best choice that Republicans could hope for from a Democratic president. Facing the very real prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency and a Democratic Senate, McConnell certainly realizes that rejecting Garland now could result in a substantially more liberal Court next year. On the other

WASHINGTON, March 9, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- President Barack Obama and leading Republican presidential candidates have called for increasing defense spending. However, given the opportunity to make their own defense budget, a majority of voters (61 percent) cut defense spending in a new in-depth survey released today by Voice Of the People. Not even a majority of Republicans made increases. In the survey, a representative sample of more than 7,000 registered voters across the country w

Maryland state Senator Jamie Raskin is at the forefront of the state's efforts to end partisan gerrymandering and enact fundamental election reform. In a state that has been called one of the most gerrymandered in the nation, and during a time when partisan politics increasingly incentivize the manipulation of district lines, Raskin believes this type of legislative action is sorely needed. Senator Raskin recently introduced the Potomac Compact for Fair Representation bill to establish an inter

With a new year comes a new legislative session in state houses around the U.S. 2016 has seen state legislators nationwide use this opportunity to empower voters by introducing bills that create new uses of ranked choice voting (RCV) at the state and local levels. Just one month into this year’s session, at least 27 pro-RCV bills have been introduced in 13 states and the District of Columbia. The proposed measures advance RCV in a variety of ways. Bills in Georgia, Massachusetts, and Vermont, f