Prospect Writing Fellows Marcia Brown and Brittany Gibson wrapped up their fellowships in 2021, but not before delivering some excellent work. We asked Marcia and Brittany to share their favorites of the year.
Nearly a year into the Biden administration, Prospect readers may be eager to see Democrats turn to executive action to realize a progressive agenda. But that hasnt totally come to pass.
Among the possibilities at the presidents fingertips are ending horrific and cruel immigration policies including Remain in Mexico and Title 42, a public-health order the Trump administration first introduced to close the border to immigrants and asylum seekers. President Biden has continued both policies, and indeed they are now Biden policies, not Trump policies. I wrote a story about how the end of those programs felt delayed in June, and its December and were still doing that.
Also, the administration has not yet recognized the immigration judges union, an organization that had historically enabled immigration judges to push for a more independent judiciary less subject to anti-immigrant political whims. We wrote about that in March.
Similarly, the president could end a pilot program to eliminate physical mail in federal prisons. The justification for the program is to stop drugs from getting into prisons through mail laced with illicit substances. But the reality is that most drugs dont enter prisons this way, and the program is instead one more way for private companies to profit and removes yet another connection incarcerated people have to their families and supporters on the outside.
Id also like to highlight my coverage of the brokerage app Robinhoods forced arbitration clause, and the widespread use of such clauses across our economy.
And finally, heres my coverage of a CNN TV spot of migrants crossing the Rio Grandefootage which was not all that it seemed.
Whats an elections reporter to do for the first half of an off-year? This year, there was no shortage of stories to tell.
2021 started by finishing the 2020 cycle with two Georgia Senate runoff elections, where Democrats took both seats in competitive races. For TAP, I was on the trail throughout the state, and in this article I catalogued the differences between the Republican and Democratic rallies. The final days of all four campaigns were packed with campaign events where the candidates spoke to two very different sets of voter priorities. The rallies represented a division thats continued throughout the stateand countryas election results continue to be doubted by a non-negligible portion of Republican voters.
A fascinating tool of the Trump era was the Trump rally. In Dalton, Georgia, on the eve of the runoff elections, I spoke with rally attendees about their election fraud concerns and how they still thought Trump could win the November general election by mid-January. It was an issue that I didnt think would persist well into 2021let alone 2022. But I suppose that it just goes to show how wrong reporters can be sometimes. Case in point, this article is titled Trumps Last Stand, and he held one of his most memorable rallies the day after it was published and has held many more rallies since.
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When the 2021 legislative sessions began, many GOP lawmakers took this opportunity to roll back access to the ballot that had temporarily been expanded because of COVID. More than 100 bills were introduced or rolled over that would limit voting options or increase the barriers to voting, either in person or by mail. And several of the bills passed, including bills in the battlegrounds Georgia and Texas. President Joe Bidens response was to pass H.R. 1 and H.R. 4; both bills expand voting access uniformly across the country. But its still unclear when therell be follow-through on those ambitions.
While Republicans and Democrats alike were dealing with new voting laws introduced in state legislatures, as well as possible federal bills impacting voting rights, and drafting their postmortems on the 2020 cycle, the DNC was quietly missing its own deadline for reviewing its 2020 primary nomination process. It missed a self-imposed deadline in March of this year to hold public hearings about the 2020 process and begin to make improvements to the 2024 process. My only question is, will we ever find out who won the Iowa caucus?
While focusing on statehouses and election law this year, I also dove into another law that was circling the desks of state legislators around the country: an app store reform bill. The bill would have ended the practice of app developers being charged high fees for payment processing by Google and Apple, the two dominant cellphone operating systems. A basic story on monopoly power and control, the legislation had the best chance of passing in Arizona but ultimately failed to make it to the governors desk after an avalanche of corporate lobbying. But advocates of the legislation say it will be back.
