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The Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), the nation's largest marijuana policy organization, released a statement Tuesday, January 10, regarding U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions' remarks on prohibition enforcement during his confirmation hearing before the Senate. Sessions is President-elect Donald Trump's pick for U.S. attorney general, the lead law enforcement official in the Executive Branch. Sessions was the first cabinet pick to have his confirmation hearing Tuesday. During the proceedings, Sen. Patr

In recent years, Americans' perception of US foreign policy has shifted, with 51 percent of people indicating that Asian countries are more important to US relations abroad than European Union nations. As the most populated country in Asia and the second-largest economy in the world, China plays an extremely critical role in US foreign policy. Many question what US-Chinese relations will look like under a Trump presidency, with various scholars having differing opinions on the matter. Donald Tr

Voters aren’t always honest. But what would it look like if they were? We found out. Here’s how we got respondents to be honest. We asked them to indicate on a 0-5 scale how much they would like each candidate to be elected president—regardless of the candidate’s actual likelihood of being elected. (We’ll talk about actual score voting in a later release.) On top of that, we thought we’d add some extra candidates, since the voting method can actually change who decides to run. In addition to t

In the wake of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer vowing to fight Trump "tooth and nail" on confirmation hearings, Vice President Joe Biden is imploring a different approach: Do your constitutional duty. Biden believes Senate Democrats should not copy the Republicans' tactic of obstructionism and give Trump's Supreme Court nominee a hearing and a vote. During a Tuesday airing of MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show, Sen. Chuck Schumer said, "We are not going to make it easy for them to pick a Supreme C

This piece, written by Rob Richie, originally appeared in Cato Unbound as the lead essay in a series on ranked choice voting in December of 2016. American democracy today is working more poorly than it has in generations. Even as the toxic 2016 presidential campaign featured the two most unpopular major party candidates in modern history and Congress has historic lows in approval, minor party presidential challengers were marginalized, and nearly 98% of congressional incumbents won re-election.

Despite the GOP's initial distaste towards now President Elect Trump (see: Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney), party members seem to have come around to the idea of a Trump presidency and are willing to work with him to forward their policy goals. One week after election day, Ryan told reporters, "Welcome to the dawn of a new unified Republican government. This will be a government focused on turning President-elect Trump's victory into real progress for the American people." While the O

Out of all the winners of the 2016 elections, the biggest might have been the Libertarian Party (LP). While Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson did not reach the coveted 5% in national polls to boost his party in future presidential elections, he did help his party extend its ballot access to 39 states for the 2018 elections. READ MORE: The 2016 Election’s Biggest Winner: Gary Johnson and The Libertarian Party? For a third party, that is a big deal. It means they do not have to spe

Keep up with the reform efforts building on the post-election momentum. Big change starts small, and these organizations have been hard at work to fix our broken system, little by little. With so much negativity in the media, it is nice to catch up on some of the encouraging efforts of hardworking Americans, fighting for reform. The following summaries have been provided by the organizations themselves: Open Primaries Open Primaries launched a new petition asking the incoming chairs of the R

In the Federalist Papers, James Madison warned about “the violence of faction.” The design of the republic was intended to accommodate a plurality of factions, so that none could control the government to the detriment of the public good. In U.S. politics, that has taken the form of parties lacking total control over representatives, who instead represent more diverse constituent interests, and form ad hoc coalitions in the Congress. For that to exist, it requires representatives whom voters see

The veto process granted by the Constitution ensures that the legislative and executive branches have to share power when it comes to new federal legislation -- while a president might veto a bill, one with popular support can still become law with a super-majority of congressional support from both chambers. Only 7 of our presidents chose not to use their constitutional prerogative to veto congressional legislation, with 2 being less-than-full term presidents. But even stranger, it took Congr