Congress

BY TAHRA GORAYA It is a great victory for American democracy to have an unprecedented number of women and people of color join the ranks of the 116th Congress. The newly elected members are diverse ethnically, religiously, socially, professionally, geographically, sexually, and politically. While much has been written about these amazing individuals, recent headlines have centered […]

BY ANDREAS WESTGAARD As the 115th Congress continues to battle on issues like the Affordable Care Act, judicial nominations, and cabinet appointments, the media and partisans alike will hype the pervasive politics-as-blood-sport narrative. Diverging from that narrative, this piece focuses instead on what Republicans and Democrats could actually work on together. While bipartisan proposals will […]

From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the policies that welcomed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees to this country from the 1960s onward, federal immigration policy has had a tremendous influence on the migration history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs). The most recent plan for immigration reform, the Reforming American Immigration […]

BY MITCHELL ALVA Will history judge the 2014 midterm elections a Congressional wave year? The election certainly felt like a repeat of 2006 and 2010. After all, in all three elections, the party of an unpopular sitting President suffered significant losses in both the House of Representatives and the Senate with one chamber of Congress […]

Educational Equity: Where We Are and Where We Need To Be Since 2001, Congressman Mike Honda has represented the 17th Congressional District of California in the U.S. House of Representatives. His district includes Silicon Valley, the birthplace of technology innovation and the leading region for the development of the technologies of tomorrow. First as a […]

Get Off the Sidelines and Get into the Game: An Interview with Senator Mazie Hirono Born in Fukushima, Japan, Mazie K. Hirono was nearly eight years old when her mother brought her and her older brother to Hawaii to escape an abusive husband and seek a better life. Hirono served in the Hawaii House of […]

In 2004, Tammy Duckworth was deployed to Iraq as a Black Hawk helicopter pilot for the Illinois Army National Guard. She was one of the first Army women to fly combat missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom until her helicopter was hit by an RPG on 12 November 2004. Duckworth lost her legs and partial use […]