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Lower the voting age? Let's raise it instead

March 17, 2019  •  The Boston Globe

AYANNA PRESSLEY'S first legislative proposal as a Massachusetts congresswoman was an amendment to lower the voting age for federal elections from 18 to 16. On March 7, the House of Representatives made short work of the measure, defeating it by a large bipartisan majority.

In her floor remarks before the roll call, Pressley claimed that 16- and 17-year-old kids are qualified to vote by virtue of the "wisdom" and "maturity" that comes from being alive and confronting the "challenges, hardships, and threats" of 2019. "Some have questioned the maturity of our youth," she told her colleagues. "I don't." If that was her best argument for lowering the voting age, it's no wonder 70 percent of House members weren't persuaded.

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Why the 'excellent' Electoral College is well worth keeping

March 13, 2019  •  The Boston Globe

THE FOES of the Electoral College are back in the news.

Late last month, Colorado legislators voted to make their state the 13th (including the District of Columbia) to join the National Popular Vote compact, which is designed to circumvent the Electoral College by having states to cast their electoral votes for the candidate who wins the most popular votes nationwide.

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Good policy, bad policymaking, and the 2020 census fight

February 24, 2019  •  The Boston Globe

IN APRIL, the Supreme Court will review a decision by a federal judge in New York that bars the Commerce Department from adding a question about citizenship to the 2020 census. It is rare for the justices to take up a case before it's been heard by an appeals court; they made an exception in this case because the government is facing a June deadline for printing the questionnaires that will be sent to every household next year.

You wouldn't know it from the furor that greeted the Trump administration's announcement that it planned to add the citizenship question, but the Census Bureau has been asking such a question for the better part of two centuries.

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Voter ID laws aren't worth fighting over

February 21, 2019  •  The Boston Globe

DEMOCRATIC AND LIBERAL activists have been railing for the last few years against voter ID laws, under which citizens must produce some form of official identification before they can cast a ballot.

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The Republican president who alienated Republicans

February 17, 2019  •  The Boston Globe

APART FROM history buffs and aficionados of presidential beards, few Americans today have ever heard of Benjamin Harrison. Yet on this Presidents Day weekend, there is a lesson to be learned from the experience of our obscure 23rd president.

When he entered the White House in 1889, it was with a pedigree unmatched in American presidential history.

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