Table Of Content
In September 2020, an appeals court upheld a Florida requirement that former felons pay all outstanding case-related fines and debts to regain their voting rights, leaving hundreds of thousands of people unable to vote in the November elections. Overall, researchers estimated that more than five million people remained disenfranchised in 2020 due to felony convictions. De facto disenfranchisement has persisted among racial and ethnic minority communities, which are disproportionately affected by laws and policies that create obstacles to voting and winning elected office. In 2013 the Supreme Court invalidated portions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, allowing certain states that previously had to submit legal changes for preclearance by federal authorities to adopt election laws without prior review.
Sound Therapy
News coverage has also grown more polarized, with certain outlets and their star commentators providing a consistently right- or left-leaning perspective. The cable network Fox News in particular grew unusually close to the Trump administration; several prominent on-air personalities and executives migrated to government jobs beginning in 2017, and key hosts openly endorsed Republican candidates or participated in campaign rallies. Following the 2020 elections, however, Fox joined other networks in calling the presidential race for Biden, and Trump subsequently denigrated the outlet, directing his followers to smaller, more extreme channels that fully endorsed his attempts to overturn the election results.
Mental Health and Substance Abuse
Despite increasingly repressive rule under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), dissent in China occurs regularly and is geographically widespread. The China Dissent Monitor features quarterly updated interactive data on collective action in public spaces and cases of online dissent.
Personal Autonomy and Individual Rights
In many instances, long-standing and rigid labor protections prevent municipal governments and police departments from imposing significant administrative sanctions on allegedly abusive officers. Under the Trump administration, the Justice Department pulled back from previous federal policies aimed at imposing reforms on troubled local police departments through court-approved agreements. Trump was harshly critical of the mainstream media throughout his presidency, routinely using inflammatory language to accuse them of bias and mendacity. As of 2020 the president had not followed through on threats to strengthen libel laws or review certain outlets’ broadcast licenses, as he largely lacked the authority to do so, though he has been accused of interfering with the other business interests of critical outlets’ owners. In July, a judge found that federal probation officers had revoked the prison furlough of Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, in retaliation for his plans to publish his own book about the president. The pandemic intensified the Trump administration’s existing lack of transparency in a number of other ways.
Each rating of 1 to 7, with 1 representing the greatest degree of freedom and 7 the smallest degree of freedom, corresponded to a specific range of total scores. While the underlying formula for converting scores into status remains identical, starting in the 2020 edition Freedom in the World no longer presented the 1–7 ratings as a separate element of its findings. The parlous state of US democracy was conspicuous in the early days of 2021 as an insurrectionist mob, egged on by the words of outgoing president Donald Trump and his refusal to admit defeat in the November election, stormed the Capitol building and temporarily disrupted Congress’s final certification of the vote. But the outburst of political violence at the symbolic heart of US democracy, incited by the president himself, threw the country into even greater crisis.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to scale back its arrests and return to the focus on dangerous criminals, but the administration continued efforts to punish cities that refused to assist ICE agents in identifying and detaining undocumented immigrants. The administration’s enforcement drive has added to an existing backlog of cases in immigration courts; as of December 2020 there were more than a million pending cases, roughly double the number pending when Trump took office. The pandemic exacerbated poor conditions in immigration detention facilities; as of mid-November, over 7,300 detainees had tested positive for the virus. Under pressure from immigrants’ rights advocates, the administration took steps to reduce the population of ICE detainees, which declined by more than 50 percent between February and November.
Treatment
Freedom House helps recovering addicts - Spectrum News
Freedom House helps recovering addicts.
Posted: Tue, 13 Feb 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Civil liberties organizations and other groups have also argued that prison sentences are often excessive and that too many people are incarcerated for minor drug offenses. The United States has a free and diverse press, operating under some of the strongest constitutional protections in the world. The media environment retains a high degree of pluralism, with newspapers, newsmagazines, traditional broadcasters, cable television networks, and news websites competing for readers and audiences. While many larger outlets have prospered, however, independent local sources of news have struggled to keep up with technology-driven changes in news consumption and advertising, contributing to significant ownership consolidation in some sectors, and a number of communities with just one or no local news outlet.
In May 2020, outrage over the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis inspired one of the largest waves of protests in US history. Under the banner of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, marches occurred in hundreds of cities and smaller communities. Estimated participation in May and June ranged from 15 to 26 million people, and daily protests occurred well into the summer in some cities. An overwhelming majority of the protests were peaceful, but in some settings they were accompanied by violence against police and significant damage to public and private property; local officials in certain cities complained of intimidating demonstrations outside their private homes. Human rights groups and academic experts found that aggressive police tactics were often the cause or prime escalating factor in violent episodes, and hundreds of instances of unprovoked or disproportionate police brutality were documented on video. At least 10,000 people had been arrested in connection with the protests by early June, though minor charges were frequently dropped.
ECAT Freedom House Graduates Honored - erienewsnow.com
ECAT Freedom House Graduates Honored.
Posted: Fri, 19 Apr 2024 21:13:00 GMT [source]
These orders, combined with other administration changes, helped to reduce the number of refugees admitted to the United States for resettlement to its lowest point since the program began in 1980. The refugee resettlement cap for the 2021 fiscal year was slashed to 15,000 people, down from 18,000 in fiscal 2020, and actual admissions remained far below the cap in 2020; prior to the Trump administration, the annual caps had generally surpassed 70,000. Federal law generally guarantees trade unions the right to organize and engage in collective bargaining. Over the years, the strength of organized labor has declined, and just 6.3 percent of the private-sector workforce belonged to unions in 2020. While public-sector unions have a higher rate of membership, with 34.8 percent, they have come under pressure from officials concerned about the cost of compensation and pensions to states and municipalities.
Black people also face discrimination in health care and experience worse outcomes than their White counterparts, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, people of color experienced strikingly higher mortality from the virus. Asian Americans were the victims of a surge in discrimination and harassment in 2020, attributed in part to President Trump’s attempts to focus blame for the pandemic on China, where the initial outbreak occurred. The protests also succeeded in drawing media and advocacy attention to many police departments’ deep resistance to any reform or accountability mechanisms, and putting a spotlight on the presence within law enforcement of some officers with direct links to racist and White supremacist groups. However, judicial appointments in recent years have added to existing concerns about partisan distortion of the appointment and confirmation process. Republican leaders in the Senate had stalled many federal judicial nominations in the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency, resulting in an unusually large number of vacancies at the beginning of 2017.
The steps drew fierce criticism from agency employees, media watchdogs, and members of Congress; in November, a federal judge granted an injunction preventing Pack from directing news coverage. The Trump administration consistently left large numbers of vacant positions across the higher levels of government departments and agencies, undercutting Congress’s authority to confirm such appointees and making it difficult or impossible for the agencies to operate as intended by law. In August 2020, the Government Accountability Office found that Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of homeland security, was serving in violation of laws governing such temporary appointments; the finding cast doubt on the legal validity of several controversial department decisions. Various interest groups have come to play a potent role in the nominating process for president and members of Congress, as the influence of traditional party leadership bodies has declined in recent decades.
Animal therapy (aka pet therapy or animal-assisted therapy) can be very healing, as it allows patients to bond with animals, who give unconditional love. This is particularly useful for those who suffered trauma by the hands of people, who may be able to trust and form closer attachments to animals than humans at certain stages of rehabilitation. That’s why experts agree a medically assisted detox is the safest way to remove addictive substances from the body. Usually done in an inpatient setting, your vitals signs and overall well being are consistently monitored and rechecked in order to keep you safe and ensure the detox is successful.
After Democrats gained a majority in the House of Representatives in the 2018 elections, the Trump administration frequently clashed with Congress in ways that challenged the legislature’s constitutional authority. For example, in 2019 the president declared a national emergency so as to redirect congressionally appropriated funds to pay for the construction of a wall along the border with Mexico, a project that he had prioritized during his presidential campaign but which had failed to win sufficient financing from lawmakers. Later that year, Trump’s irregular obstruction of appropriated military aid to Ukraine and his orders to defy subpoenas culminated in the House impeachment inquiry. During 2020 the administration continued its refusal to comply with a host of congressional reporting requirements, information requests, and subpoenas on various oversight matters. Critics have argued that the Electoral College system for presidential elections is undemocratic, as it violates the principle that each citizen’s vote should carry equal weight.
In the years since, in addition to adopting voter-identification requirements and limiting polling locations, a number of states—including some that were never subject to the preclearance rule—have rolled back innovations like early voting that contributed to higher rates of participation among minority groups. The Trump campaign in 2020 drew criticism for a pattern in which administrative resources were misused to support the president’s candidacy. Administration officials routinely promoted Trump’s reelection or attacked his Democratic opponents, which apparently violated federal laws barring government employees from engaging in electioneering and other political activities. The president also repeatedly used the White House, his official plane, and other government facilities for campaign events. Separately, Trump on multiple occasions threatened or sought to withhold federal resources from states and cities whose Democratic leaders opposed him politically.
Other authoritarian states have joined China in these efforts, even as key democracies abandoned allies and their own values in foreign policy matters. The United States is a federal republic whose people benefit from a vibrant political system, a strong rule-of-law tradition, robust freedoms of expression and religious belief, and a wide array of other civil liberties. However, in recent years its democratic institutions have suffered erosion, as reflected in partisan pressure on the electoral process, bias and dysfunction in the criminal justice system, harmful policies on immigration and asylum seekers, and growing disparities in wealth, economic opportunity, and political influence. Electoral Democracy – Freedom in the World assigns the designation “electoral democracy” to countries that have met certain minimum standards for political rights and civil liberties; territories are not included in the list of electoral democracies.
In addition to structural inequalities and discrimination in wages and employment, racial and ethnic minority groups face long-running and interrelated disparities in education and housing. De facto school segregation is a persistent problem, and the housing patterns that contribute to it are influenced by factors such as mortgage discrimination, which particularly affects Black and Hispanic homeowners. Black homeownership has fallen steadily from a peak in 2004, despite gains for other groups in recent years.
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