It has long been the case that when states draw legislative districts, they count everyone living there. But some conservative activists are seeking to upend that practice, advocating for states to only count adult citizens when making maps for their legislatures.

The Brennan Center’s new study of Texas, Georgia, and Missouri pinpoints just who would be harmed by such an upheaval, and the results follow a disturbing pattern of disenfranchisement. Latino, Asian American, and Black communities would bear the brunt of representational losses, as urban and suburban areas that skew young and diverse would be deprived of their fair share of political power and public goods in favor of white rural areas.

Two decades after 9/11, we can see which national security strategies have worked and which haven’t — but the government has been slow to learn these lessons. In a new essay series, experts from inside and outside the Brennan Center offer big-picture looks at where we went wrong and how to approach national security going forward.

Launching the series, Faiza Patel writes that the attacks sparked a wrongheaded wave of using race, religion, or political views as indicators for terrorism. The FBI’s rules for intelligence collection have proven inadequate to protect free speech and guard against discrimination. The result has subverted legitimate counterterrorism aims. We must revisit these permissive rules in order to ban invidious profiling under the guise of national security.

Community supervision began in the 19th century as a peer-to-peer system of support, in which citizens came forward to assure officials that they could help those convicted of crime to live lawfully outside of jail or prison. Public agencies later took over, and in today’s system, many of those agencies are more primed to find and punish failure than to promote success. In this installment of our Punitive Excess series, Peggy McGarry looks at how community supervision can be transformed back into a structure for assisting people caught up in the justice system, not hurting them further.

Most states are now done with their legislative sessions, and the damage to voting rights is clear: 18 states have passed 30 new laws in 2021 that make voting harder. Read more on Instagram >>

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