When Bipartisanship is a No-Brainer
The Senate’s failure to ratify a UN convention on disabled rights is a case study in everything that’s wrong with the institution, I write in my column for The Sunday Telegraph:
"It needs to be a wake-up call about a broken institution that's letting down the American people." So said John Kerry in a fit of frustration after the Senate voted against ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
This was the sort of pro-forma vote that would have passed with broad bipartisan support a decade or so ago – a symbolic signing on to a UN treaty that aimed to raise international standards on the treatment of the disabled, not to some dizzying new height but to the level the US achieved more than 20 years ago under President George H W Bush.
Read it at The Sunday Telegraph.
About the Author
John Avlon
John Avlon is senior columnist for Newsweek and The Daily Beast, and the host of Beast TV. He is a CNN contributor regularly appearing on the show Erin Burnett Out Front at 7 p.m. EST. He won the National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ award for best online column in 2012.
Avlon: Government Has 'Proper' Regulation Role
Last week's tragic fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, has brought the issue of government regulation back to the forefront. On Friday night's Real Time with Bill Maher, The Daily Beast's Political Director John Avlon denounces deregulation rhetoric.
Unlimited Funds
Probing the Super-PAC Economy
The Dark Money Shuffle
The strange, opaque world of politically minded nonprofits. By John Avlon and Michael Keller.
See More Politics
From The Daily Beast
Obama: I Make the Drone Decisions
How the military tried to get more control over drone targeting decisions—and lost. By Daniel Klaidman.
Comments