Brendan Fischer's News Articles

The GOP's partisan redistricting process has come under renewed scrutiny in recent months, with gerrymandered maps helping Republicans hold Congress despite receiving fewer votes than Democrats, and state legislators discussing plans to rig the presidential election by awarding electoral votes according to those contorted boundaries. But out of all the states re-drawing Congressional boundaries along partisan lines after the 2010 elections, Wisconsin's gerrymandering may have been the most egregious.

Virginia's governor has come out against a partisan effort to reallocate electoral college votes by Congressional district, but the plan is far from dead in other states, with governors in Wisconsin and Michigan voicing support for similar measures. The split between Virginia and other states on this issue may not be explained entirely by cooler heads prevailing -- it might be part of a political calculation about how best to elect a Republican president in 2016.

Just days before three people were shot in an altercation on a college campus in Texas, fourteen Texas State Senators co-sponsored a National Rifle Association-backed bill to prohibit colleges from restricting concealed handguns on campuses. The legislation closely resembles a "model" adopted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Civil rights organizations like the NAACP and groups dedicated to overturning the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision have found common ground in recent months, coming together under the "Money Out, Voters In" banner to fight the dual threats of money in politics and voter suppression. But on the other end of the political spectrum, right-wing activists like Karl Rove are drawing parallels between heroic African-American civil rights activists in 1950s Alabama and privileged 1%ers like the Koch brothers, arguing that a 1958 Supreme Court ruling protecting the NAACP's membership list should allow the super-rich to write million dollar checks without the public ever knowing.