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Blog page 14 of 30
How to Testify Before a State Legislative Committee How statehouse committee hearings work, from bill numbers and witness registration to written testimony and the two minutes at the table, and how ordinary people use them to shape a bill. How Workers at Amazon's Staten Island Warehouse Won Their Union Vote How an independent union with no national backing won the 2022 vote at Amazon's JFK8 warehouse, why a first contract never followed, and what later drives took from it. Humphrey's Executor, the 1935 Case Behind Independent Agencies Roosevelt fired a conservative FTC commissioner in 1933 and lost in the Supreme Court. How that case built independent agencies, and how Trump's 2025 FTC firings led the Court to undo it in 2026. Ida B. Wells and the Pamphlet That Made Lynching a National Scandal After a mob killed her friend Thomas Moss in 1892, Ida B. Wells counted the dead, published the numbers, lost her press and changed how America saw lynching. Ida May Fuller's First Check and the Building of Social Security A retired Vermont legal secretary got the first monthly Social Security check in 1940. How a narrow 1935 law grew to cover workers it first left out. Incorporation, or How the Bill of Rights Came to Bind the States The Bill of Rights once limited only Washington. Here is how the Fourteenth Amendment, a 1925 sedition case and decades of rulings made it bind your state and city too. IVF After the Alabama Supreme Court's Frozen Embryo Ruling How a 2024 Alabama ruling that frozen embryos count as children under a wrongful-death law paused IVF clinics, what the quick legislative fix left open, and why personhood matters. James Hansen's Hot June Day Before the Senate in 1988 On June 23, 1988, a NASA scientist told senators global warming had begun. Here is what that hearing changed, what Washington did and failed to do next, and why it took decades. Janus v. AFSCME and Public-Sector Unions After Mandatory Fees The 2018 Supreme Court ruling that ended mandatory fees for government workers was expected to gut public unions. Here is what it held, what happened next and what it means for bargaining. John L. Lewis, a Punch at the 1935 AFL Convention and the Birth of the CIO How a mine workers' chief threw one punch in Atlantic City in 1935, walked out of the old craft federation and built the industrial unions that organized steel and autos. Julia Lathrop and the 1912 Children's Bureau That Studied Why Babies Died In 1912 Julia Lathrop became the first woman to run a federal bureau and set out to learn why so many American babies died. Her door-to-door studies led to the Sheppard-Towner Act. Kansas Voters Rejected an Abortion Amendment in August 2022 Six weeks after Dobbs, voters in deeply Republican Kansas defeated an amendment to remove abortion protections. How the campaign was won and what it taught every ballot fight since.