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Office of Rep. Derek Kilmer announcement.

U.S. Representative Derek Kilmer (WA-06) has been recognized with a perfect score on Common Causes 2022Democracy Scorecard a nonpartisan accounting of actions of all Members of Congress on a range of democracy-related legislation, including campaign finance reform, the protection and expansion of voting rights, and putting an end to partisan gerrymandering.

Theres too much money, too many special interests, and too little accountability in our government. Americans deserve to have their voices heard and votes counted. Thats why since day one as our regions representative Ive been working to reduce the role of money in politics, combat voter suppression, fix the broken political system, and get Congress back on track and back to getting things done,said Rep. Kilmer. Our government should work for the American people. Thats why its important for Congress to root out corruption, strengthen our systems of checks and balances, and protect the right to vote. Ill keep pushing to get pro-democracy legislation signed into law and to make government work better for folks.

Nearly two years after the January 6thinsurrection and at a time when some power-hungry state legislatures have made it significantly harder for certain Americans to vote, we need more leaders like Congressman Kilmer to stand up for the rule of law and for the freedom to vote,said Aaron Scherb,Senior Director of Legislative Affairs at Common Cause. Our Democracy Scorecard can serve as a resource to help citizens understand which members of Congress are protecting our voices and who is trying to make it harder to vote; we commend Congressman Kilmer for getting a perfect score on the 2022 Democracy Scorecard.

In Congress, Rep. Kilmer has been recognized as a leader on campaign finance reform and continues to push for legislation that would improve transparency, reduce the role of big money in campaigns, and fix the commission charged with enforcing federal election laws. As the Chair of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, Rep. Kilmer has led the charge to make Congress more effective and efficient passing over 170 bipartisan recommendations that aim to make the federal government work better for the American people.

Rep. Kilmer co-sponsored and voted to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act of 2022, a sweeping package of reform bills aimed at strengthening the voice of the American people in their democracy by making it easier to vote, reducing the role of big money in the political process, and ensuring public officials work for the public interest. This comprehensive reform package includes two bipartisan bills led by Representative Kilmer, the Honest Ads Act and the Resorting Integrity to Americas Election Act, which aim to increase transparency in our campaign finance and election laws.

This Congress, Common Cause recognized Kilmer for holding a pro-democracy stance on 14 bills that were voted on by the House including H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act legislation he helpedintroducethat aims to strengthen Americas democratic institutions against future presidents, regardless of political party, who seek to abuse the power of their office. He also sponsored H.R. 5746, the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act apackageof reform bills aimed at strengthening the voice of the American people in their democracy. In addition, he was recognized for co-sponsoring 4 pieces of pro-democracy legislation including H.R. 5008, the Frank Harrison, Elizabeth Peratrovich and Miguel Trujillo Native American Voting Rights Act which aims to protect the sacred right to vote and ensure equal access to the electoral process for Native Americans.

Kilmer has been recognized previously for his efforts to fight to fix the broken political system and secure American elections. This year, he received an A rating on the 2022legislative scorecardby End Citizens United // Let America Vote Action Fund which tracks Members support for legislation to reduce the role of big money and special interests in politics, restore ethics in Washington, and protect and expand the right to vote. In 2019, Kilmerreceivedthe inaugural Teddy Roosevelt Courage Award by Issue One, a leading cross-partisan political reform organization. The Award was given in the spirit of the 26th President of the United States, who was a staunch defender of good, ethical government and the U.S. political system.

Common Cause is a nonpartisan, national grassroots organization of more than 1 million members and supporters dedicated to upholding the core values of American democracy. The annual Democracy Scorecard aims to offer a factual, nonpartisan record of actions by each member of Congress on a variety of democracy-related legislation.

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Kilmer Receives National Recognition for Efforts to Protect & Strengthen Democracy The Suburban Times - The Suburban Times

As Banned Books Week began Monday in the United States, a leading advocacy group published an updated report warning of a surge in right-wing efforts to censor and ban titlesmany of them related to the struggles of marginalized peoplesin American schools.

"More books banned. More districts. More states. More students losing access to literature. 'More' is the operative word for this report on school book bans," begins the update to PEN America's Banned in the USA: Rising School Book Bans Threaten Free Expression and Students' First Amendment Rights, which was published in April and covered the first nine months of the 2021-22 scholastic year.

"This is a concerted, organized, well-resourced push at censorship," PEN America chief executive Suzanne Nossel told The New York Times, adding that the effort "is ideologically motivated and politically expedient, and it needs to be understood as such in order to be confronted and addressed properly."

The revised reportwhich shares the Banned in the USA title with the first music album to ever carry a parental advisory stickernotes that PEN America's Index of School Book Bans now lists at least 2,532 instances of 1,648 titles being banned. That's up from 1,586 banning incidents involving 1,145 books reported in the April publication.

The bans occurred in 138 school districts across 32 states. In 96% of cases, bans were enacted without following the best practice guidelines for challenging controversial titles outlined by the American Library Association and the National Coalition Against Censorship.

More than 40% of the banned books in the report deal with LGBTQ+ themes, while 21% "directly address issues of race and racism," 22% "contain sexual content," and 10% are "related to rights and activism," according to PEN America.

PEN America identified at least 50 national, state, and local groups pushing to ban or restrict books in U.S. schools.

The largest of these groups, the right-wing Moms for Liberty, has over 200 local chapters and has gained notoriety for its anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy, for vehemently opposing Covid-19 mask mandates in schools, and for spreading the baseless claim that one local school district was placing litter boxes in bathrooms for students who identify as cats.

Another right-wing group named in the report, MassResistance, is a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group that claims the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol was "clearly a setup" and that there is a "Black Lives Matter and LGBT assault" on American schools.

The group also called parents who opposed its book-banning efforts "groomers," a slur conflating the LGBTQ+ community with pedophilia.

"Book challenges impede free expression rights, which must be the bedrock of public schools in an open, inclusive, and democratic society," PEN America said in the updated report. "These bans pose a dangerous precedent to those in and out of schools, intersecting with other movements to block or curtail the advances in civil rights for historically marginalized people."

"Against the backdrop of other efforts to roll back civil liberties and erode democratic norms," the group added, "the dynamics surrounding school book bans are a canary in the coal mine for the future of American democracy, public education, and free expression. We should heed this warning."

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'Heed This Warning': 2,500+ Book Bans Threaten US Schools and Democracy - Common Dreams

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPMs home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published atThe Conversation.

The United States may regard itself as a leader of the free world, but an index of development released in July 2022 places the country much farther down the list.

In its global rankings, the United Nations Office of Sustainable Development dropped the U.S. to 41st worldwide, down from its previous ranking of 32nd. Under this methodology an expansive model of 17 categories, or goals, many of them focused on the environment and equity the U.S. ranks between Cuba and Bulgaria. Both are widely regarded as developing countries.

The U.S. is also now considered a flawed democracy, according to The Economists democracy index.

As a political historian who studies U.S. institutional development, I recognize these dismal ratings as the inevitable result of two problems. Racism has cheated many Americans out of the health care, education, economic security and environment they deserve. At the same time, as threats to democracy become more serious, a devotion to American exceptionalism keeps the country from candid appraisals and course corrections.

The Office of Sustainable Developments rankings differ from more traditional development measures in that they are more focused on the experiences of ordinary people, including their ability to enjoy clean air and water, than the creation of wealth.

So while the gigantic size of the American economy counts in its scoring, so too does unequal access to the wealth it produces. When judged by accepted measures like the Gini coefficient, income inequality in the U.S. has risen markedly over the past 30 years. By the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Developments measurement, the U.S. has the biggest wealth gap among G-7 nations.

These results reflect structural disparities in the United States, which are most pronounced for African Americans. Such differences have persisted well beyond the demise of chattel slavery and the repeal of Jim Crow laws.

Scholar W.E.B. Du Bois first exposed this kind of structural inequality in his 1899 analysis of Black life in the urban north, The Philadelphia Negro. Though he noted distinctions of affluence and status within Black society, Du Bois found the lives of African Americans to be a world apart from white residents: a city within a city. Du Bois traced the high rates of poverty, crime and illiteracy prevalent in Philadelphias Black community to discrimination, divestment and residential segregation not to Black peoples degree of ambition or talent.

More than a half-century later, with characteristic eloquence, Martin Luther King Jr. similarly decried the persistence of the other America, one where the buoyancy of hope was transformed into the fatigue of despair.

To illustrate his point, King referred to many of the same factors studied by Du Bois: the condition of housing and household wealth, education, social mobility and literacy rates, health outcomes and employment. On all of these metrics, Black Americans fared worse than whites. But as King noted, Many people of various backgrounds live in this other America.

The benchmarks of development invoked by these men also featured prominently in the 1962 book The Other America, by political scientist Michael Harrington, founder of a group that eventually became the Democratic Socialists of America. Harringtons work so unsettled President John F. Kennedy that it reportedly galvanized him into formulating a war on poverty.

Kennedys successor, Lyndon Johnson, waged this metaphorical war. But poverty bound to discrete places. Rural areas and segregated neighborhoods stayed poor well beyond mid-20th-century federal efforts.

In large part that is because federal efforts during that critical time accommodated rather than confronted the forces of racism, according to my research.

Across a number of policy domains, the sustained efforts of segregationist Democrats in Congress resulted in an incomplete and patchwork system of social policy. Democrats from the South cooperated with Republicans to doom to failure efforts to achieve universal health care or unionized workforces. Rejecting proposals for strong federal intervention, they left a checkered legacy of local funding for education and public health.

Today, many years later, the effects of a welfare state tailored to racism is evident though perhaps less visibly so in the inadequate health policies driving a shocking decline in average American life expectancy.

There are other ways to measure a countrys level of development, and on some of them the U.S. fares better.

The U.S. currently ranks 21st on the United Nations Development Programs index, which measures fewer factors than the sustainable development index. Good results in average income per person $64,765 and an average 13.7 years of schooling situate the United States squarely in the developed world.

Its ranking suffers, however, on appraisals that place greater weight on political systems.

The Economists democracy index now groups the U.S. among flawed democracies, with an overall score that ranks between Estonia and Chile. It falls short of being a top-rated full democracy in large part because of a fractured political culture. This growing divide is most apparent in the divergent paths between red and blue states.

Although the analysts from The Economist applaud the peaceful transfer of power in the face of an insurrection intended to disrupt it, their report laments that, according to a January 2022 poll, only 55% of Americans believe that Mr. Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

Election denialism carries with it the threat that election officials in Republican-controlled jurisdictions will reject or alter vote tallies that do not favor the Republican Party in upcoming elections, further jeopardizing the score of the U.S. on the democracy index.

Red and blue America also differ on access to modern reproductive care for women. This hurts the U.S. gender equality rating, one aspect of the United Nations sustainable development index.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Republican-controlled states have enacted or proposed grossly restrictive abortion laws, to the point of endangering a womans health.

I believe that, when paired with structural inequalities and fractured social policy, the dwindling Republican commitment to democracy lends weight to the classification of the U.S. as a developing country.

To address the poor showing of the United States on a variety of global surveys, one must also contend with the idea of American exceptionalism, a belief in American superiority over the rest of the world.

Both political parties have long promoted this belief, at home and abroad, but exceptionalism receives a more formal treatment from Republicans. It was the first line of the Republican Partys national platform of 2016 and 2020 (we believe in American exceptionalism). And it served as the organizing principle behind Donald Trumps vow to restore patriotic education to Americas schools.

In Florida, after lobbying by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state board of education in July 2022 approved standards rooted in American exceptionalism while barring instruction in critical race theory, an academic framework teaching the kind of structural racism Du Bois exposed long ago.

With a tendency to proclaim excellence rather than pursue it, the peddling of American exceptionalism encourages Americans to maintain a robust sense of national achievement despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

Kathleen Frydl is a Sachs lecturer at Johns Hopkins University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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US Is Becoming A 'Developing Country' On Global Rankings That Measure Democracy, Inequality - TPM

Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar on Tuesday described the functioning of the legislature as the key to a vibrant and healthy democracy as they authentically represent the will and aspirations of the people.

He was addressing the felicitation function in the state assembly here.

Dhankhar also expressed deep concern over the inhuman conduct of the members in Parliament and legislative assemblies, saying that it is a tough challenge to the democratic system.

He called decency and discipline, the soul of democracy. ''The functioning of Parliament and legislature is the key to a vibrant and healthy democracy. These institutions authentically represent the will as well as the aspirations of the people,'' the vice president said.

He said people's representatives are required to perform important constitutional duties in these temples of democracy and held them as a powerful medium to enlighten the governments.

It is a meaningful and effective means of realising the aspirations of the people and it is the fundamental duty of these institutions to hold the executive accountable and establish transparency and accountability, Dhankhar added.

He described discipline and healthy brainstorming as the soul of democracy, highlighting their importance in the Parliamentary system.

Debate, discussion, and deliberation in the parliamentary system are the elixir of democracy. As the largest democracy in the world, the conduct of our elected representatives should be exemplary, he said.

The vice president said, ''Today's situation is very serious and worrying Parliament and legislative assemblies are no less than a wrestling arena. The present situation is a very worrying sign about democracy and it is a cause of the great challenge and deep concern to the democratic system.'' He said decency and discipline are the souls of democracy and added that elected people's representatives should set high standards by their actions and words. The prestige of the people's representatives and the working capacity of the legislative bodies are absolutely necessary for the healthy development of democracy, said the VP. Any lapse on these issues will affect our other public institutions as well, he added.

Traditionally our Parliament and legislative assemblies have been functioning peacefully, and decently, he said, urging political parties to come together and resolve their differences in the spirit of consensus. Dhankhar said the administration gets guidance only from the dignified legislative bodies. In this context, he urged members to take inspiration from the debates of the constituent assembly.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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Functioning of legislature, key to vibrant and healthy democracy: VP - Devdiscourse

Beijing [China], September 20 (ANI): China has sharpened its line of attack on the Wests version of democracy ahead of President Xi Jinpings crowning achievement at the National Party Congress this October the third term in office a feat not achieved since the death of Chairman Mao Zedong in 1976.

Chinese theorists, ministers and spin doctors came together to set out their plans for a new era of government one they hoped would allow the Chinese Communist Party to remain in power forever while giving it the international respect it craves, reported The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH)

They were annoyed at the optics of China being snubbed from US President Joe Bidens Summit for Democracy, had grown frustrated at Chinas economic power not being matched by its diplomatic clout, and were anxious to avoid the endless cycle of rising and fall that has bedevilled Chinas empires for millennia.

In meetings in the capital, the officials at the State Council Office sharpened their line of attack on the Wests version of democracy. They argued it was full of selfish politicians, broken campaign promises and fragmented societies, reported SMH.

There is nothing wrong with democracy per se, the advisers offered bluntly in a 50-page white paper. Some countries have encountered setbacks and crises in their quest for democracy only because their approach was wrong.

Democracy with Chinese characteristics, they said, could unite countries behind their long-term economic goals and guarantee stability.

The launch of the white paper in December was a brash affair. Fronted by Guo Zhenhua, the deputy secretary general of the Standing Committee of the National Peoples Congress and Xu Lin, the minister of the State Council Information Office, it was largely dismissed by the West because of its colourful language, contradictions and propaganda, reported SMH.

But between metaphors, the white paper contained a plan not just for Chinas future, but the push to export Chinas model and burnish Xis legacy as he becomes the most powerful leader since Mao.

China did not duplicate Western models of democracy, but created its own, the State Council said. It all boils down to whether the people can enjoy a good life.

They argued what defined democracy was not whether one person had one vote, but whether the government fulfilled promises and enforced the rule of law.

There is no fixed model of democracy, the State Council said. Whether a country is democratic should be acknowledged by the international community, not arbitrarily decided by a few self-appointed judges, referring to American-led multilateral groups such as the Quad, Five Eyes and the G7, reported SMH.

The advisers acknowledged that in Chinas version of democracy there were no opposition parties, but argued that Chinas political party system is not a system of one-party rule.

Moreover, Xi now has unparalleled power at home. Chinese media reports suggest the 69-year-old is likely to be named as either the Peoples Leader or Chairman at the National Party Congress on October 16.

But he faces trouble overseas, where Chinas growing aggression towards Taiwan, bellicose diplomatic rhetoric and COVID-19 response have isolated it from advanced economies. Chinas push to rebrand democracy is part of its global outreach campaign to developing countries that feel isolated by the West. (ANI)

This report is auto-generated from ANI news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.

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China sharpens attack on Wests version of democracy ahead of Xis third term - ThePrint