It’s Rank, All Right
What to know: Alaska voters will soon go to the polls and decide whether to abolish ranked choice voting — a system that President Donald Trump has called “stupid.”
The TPPF take: Ranked choice voting has been anything but simple for Alaskans.
“Ranked-choice voting lets Alaskans rank candidates in general elections instead of choosing just one,” says TPPF’s Byron Fisher. “If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated, and ballots move to the voter’s next choice until one candidate has a majority of the votes still in the count. It sounds simple in theory. Following what happens after a vote is cast is another story.”
For more on ranked choice voting, click here.
That’s Now How It Works
What to know: Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum is blaming the United States — not her MORENA party’s own corruption — for the power criminal cartels hold in her country.
The TPPF take: The Shield of the Americas coalition now coordinates intelligence and operations against cartel networks, but with a handful of exceptions: Mexico, Brazil, Cuba and Nicaragua.
“In Mexico, President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Morena government is increasingly alone,” says TPPF’s Chuck DeVore. “It keeps bilateral contacts with Washington while refusing the regional coalition, citing fear of U.S. operations on Mexican soil. Cartels are businesses under pressure. They will trade some territory for laboratories, drones and officials who can be bought or frightened. The test is whether the Shield of the Americas coalition raises those costs faster than the cartels and their corrupted political patrons can reroute.”
For more on Mexico and the cartels, click here.
Civics Education
What to know: Why is civics education under such fire from the classical liberals who should support it?
The TPPF take: Our Founders understood that a free people can’t remain free unless they’re educated in freedom, not merely in its procedures, but in its moral and intellectual foundations.
“We’re producing a generation that may know a little bit about how government works, but students are not taught why government ought to be limited,” says TPPF’s Tom Lindsay. “They’re not taught why consent must be informed by virtue. They’re not taught why the doctrine of human equality found in the Declaration of Independence simultaneously forbids slavery and, at the same time, forbids government-enforced sameness. Without this moral formation, civics either becomes empty formalism, ”How a bill becomes law,’ or ideological advocacy. Neither of those two approaches prepares students to be self-governing citizens.”