The Political Puerto Rican

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There is Still Hope for Local News Outlets

November 30, 2021

Getty Editorial As we have discussed a little throughout the semester, as the world becomes more and more connected, local news organizations become more and more nationalized. While this is still the exception and not the rule, as media corporations continue to amass organizations under their umbrellas, uniform and national reporting of local stories will be on the rise, but the Build Back Better Agenda is hoping to provide a boost to the industry as a whole, including the little guys. In President Bidens multi-trillion dollar social relief package hoping to pass the Senate, there is a large sum of money for a relatively unpublicized sector: local news organizations. The relief package will set aside $1.67 billion over the next five years for outlets that primarily cover local news. If this seems too good to be true, it sort of is. The package is not disregarding national news organizations and media conglomerates as many of the local and regional outlets are actually under...

Has influencing public policy has been made easier by social media?

November 28, 2021

Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times It is no secret or surprise that social media and the fast spread of the internet has allowed the world to become more connected than ever before. In a study done two years ago by the Pew Research Center, they found that the internet and the advent of more communication technologies has allowed for greater impact on politics. This got me thinking about if the public is influencing policy more or if we are just more aware of decisions being made in the government. As I was contemplating these questions, Biden announced his plan to ramp up vaccine production as well as vaccine distribution around the globe . As pointed out in the article, this move was made amid recent outcries against the administration for the lac...

Is voter fraud as rampant as some claim it is?

November 18, 2021

https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/#choose-a-state The short answer: no. The longer answer: still no. Following the 2020 presidential election and former President Trump's defeat by now President Biden, the GOP and other higher up party officials began spewing rhetoric that the election was "stolen" and began to do everything in their power to find instances of voter fraud that contributed to Trump losing his reelection bid. In a report done by The Heritage Foundation , they found that since 1982 (yes, you read that right. Just under 40 years ago) there have only been 1,334 cases of proven voter fraud. While that could be considered enough to turn a single presidential election (e.g. Bush/Gore 2000 and those ~500 votes), that has been spread across decades and cannot account for the "millions" of votes that were claimed to had been stolen in 2020. The math simply does not add up. The article I found that sparked this deep dive into voter fraud was about a man...

What does it mean to be censured in Congress?

November 18, 2021

In a rare move made by the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday, Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona was formally censured by the House in a near straight partisan split. This was done after the representative had posted a video to his social media portraying him m-rdering fellow representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So what exactly is a censuring? As defined by the U.S. Senate : " It is a formal statement of disapproval...". While it is not outlined by the Constitution it is a power featured in both chambers of Congress and censure can come from either or both. For Rep. Gosar, his censure removed him from the committees he was serving on, and while it is considered a severe rebuke, it does not remove a congressmember from Congress, therefore they continue having the job, they just have this stain on their legacy. While social media censuring, as mentioned many times on this blog, are not considered first amendment protections, formal House censuring is a measure...

The First Amendment and Social Media, Again

November 18, 2021

AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File In a rather unprecedented, but not altogether unsurprising move recently, former President Trump and his team announced the creation of a social media platform after being banned off of several of them earlier this year due to false claims of campaign fraud as well as content relating to the January 6 riot. In a deliberate move to counter the sites Trump was pushed off of earlier this year, in the platforms Terms of Service it " bar users from annoying any of the site’s employees and from statements that “'disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site.'” In essence, users of the platform cannot make aggressive or inflammatory statements against the site - and one can assume former President Trump. So how does this relate to the First Amendment again? In one of my earlier blog posts, I discussed how at the very base, social media platforms do not fall under the protection of the First Amendment. When many political a...

Voting Rights and You

October 21, 2021

Chip Somodevilla / Getty / The Atlantic In the 2020 election, it seemed that faith in the right to free and fair elections was at an all time low as this country's former president sowed discontent and distrust in the existing voting system. The voting system in the United States is far from perfect but as we finished another census year, state legislatures across the country are redrawing their districts and many GOP-led states are doing so in ways that will dilute the power of Black and Latinx voters. While the "cracking" part of gerrymandering is technically illegal, redistricting in partisan favor is not, and Republican states have little interest in granting minorities more voting power. Voting rights are once again on the national agenda and many worry that the White House is not doing enough to guarantee voting rights across the country. President Biden and Vice President Harris ran on the promise to enfranchise previously discriminated against populations by expan...