African-American members of the U.S. House of Representatives recently held its special inauguration ceremony with new members, a new chairman and a renewed sense of commitment to continue the fight to ensure equality for blacks.

More than 300 people packed the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center's Congressional Auditorium to witness the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's biannual "A Ceremonial Swearing-In" on January 3. The two-hour event attracted spouses and family members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), leaders of national think tanks and corporate leaders, as well.

U.S. Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), who assumed the helm as the chairman of the CBC, said the organization will not be shut out of the national discourse on the economy and other vital issues.

"As the Congressional Black Caucus, we recognize the unique role that we have to play," said Fudge, 60. "We are not just the conscience of the Congress but of the country."

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David Bositis, the senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Northwest, said that despite the CBC's power among Democrats, they will have problems getting their agenda through Congress.

"They are in the political minority in the House and the House is run on a very short rope," Bositis said. "It is a very partisan place and the CBC will be on the losing end of most votes."

Read more at The Washington Informer.

Virginia’s Third District Congressman Robert “Bobby” Scott, a Democrat, joined the chorus of Representatives who voted against the recently pass legislation which allowed the Congress and the White House to avoid going over the fiscal cliff on New Year’s Day.

Scott said the legislation would add trillion of dollars to the existing federal deficit and may force legislators to cut the budgets of various social safety net programs supporting the poor and elderly to pay for the continuation of the Bush era tax cuts for people earning below $450,000.

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Not only does the legislation end the Bush era tax cuts for people earning above $450.000 a year, it also ends the federal tax holiday so there will be higher payroll taxes. There will be a delay in the automatic and drastic cuts to social programs or the defense budget for at least two months and it does not raise the debt ceiling, which President Obama wants the Congress to tackle on its next month.

It does extend the federal unemployment insurance for another year for some of the 12 million people still looking for work.

Scott outlined his position, highlighting that it adds some $3.9 trillion dollars to the national deficit.

“So how are we going to pay for all these new tax cuts,” Scott told the New Journal and Guide the day after the House voted to pass the bill.  ”The only option we have is to cut funding for Social Security, Medicaid, education, transportation and defense.”

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Dr. Wilhelmina Leigh, a senior research assistant at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies agrees that restructuring the Social Security and Medicare programs would be an option to bolster fiscal standing, but she does agree with privatizing it.

“I think that the Congressman took a principled plan,” said Leigh. “Once they revisit this issue they should consider raising taxes or changing how Social Security is funded and administered to strengthen it.”

Read more at the New Journal and Guide.

During the Congressional Black Caucus legislative week in 2004, there was a fundraising reception held for a young black politician from Chicago who hoped to represent his state in the U.S. Senate. The honorary chairs of the fundraiser were Reps. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.), Harold Ford Jr. (D-Tenn.), Artur Davis (D-Ala.) and Kendrick Meek (D-Fla.). They helped raise money for Barack Obama, who went on to win the Illinois Senate seat. We all know how the story ends. In 2008 Obama became the first black president of the United States and in November was elected for a second term.

The young black politicians who helped raise funds for Obama were known as the "the New Breed." They arrived in Washington during the mid- to late 1990s and early 2000s and were part of the hip-hop generation, the generation born between 1965 and 1984. Jackson became a member of Congress in 1995. Ford joined him in the House two years later. In January 2003, Meek and Davis were sworn in. And just two years earlier, in 2001, Kwame Kilpatrick became the youngest mayor of Detroit when he was elected at age 31.

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But what happened to these young men who came into office with such ambition? Unfortunately, their aspirations met reality, Gillespie said.

Ford and Meek, both from political families, ran for Senate in their respective states and lost. Davis, a Harvard graduate and former assistant U.S. attorney, wanted to be the first black governor of Alabama but failed to secure the Democratic nomination in his state.

"The younger generation actually thought that there were greater opportunities for them to be able to act upon their ambition, and because of that they took risks that older black politicians and earlier cohorts of black politicians didn’t take. Unfortunately they [the risks] didn’t pay off," said Gillespie. "In Artur Davis’ case he miscalculated. He took the Obama moment and hoped that it would transfer to success in the Deep South."

The tragic disappointment of Jackson and Kilpatrick is another story. After 17 years in Congress, Jackson resigned from his seat on Nov. 21 to "focus on restoring" his health. Jackson was diagnosed with bipolar II depression this summer. The former congressman remains under federal investigation for misuse of campaign funds. Kilpatrick resigned as mayor of Detroit in 2008 after a corruption trial that included a sexting scandal. He served jail time and is currently in court again facing more corruption charges.

"Jesse Jackson, he wanted to break into the higher level offices that African Americans seldom win -- governor, senator," said David Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Kwame, he said, "was a young man who didn’t view the world as a potentially dangerous place. I think to some degree, he thought he could pretty much do what he wanted."

Read more at SC Black News.

As the nation's first African-American president, Barack Obama benefited from and expanded his party's enormous advantage among minority voters.

But as he prepares to start his second term, Obama hasn't managed to usher in behind him many Democrats who are minorities to top elected office. Conversely, Republicans — despite their highly limited support among non-Anglo voters — have managed to elevate more top politicians from minority backgrounds.

"It's just an objective, empirical fact that more members of minority groups have done well winning in the Republican Party," says Artur Davis, a former Democratic congressman from Alabama who has switched allegiance to the GOP.

"The Republican Party has proven welcoming to minorities, and its voters will elect minorities as long as those minorities share their worldview, as long as those minorities are conservatives," Davis says.

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Still, reaching the top rungs can be difficult for African-American politicians in particular — because the vast majority of those holding elected office are in the South.

Neither Davis nor Ford was able to win election, and other blacks nominated to statewide posts in the South have done even more poorly.

In addition to the region's conservative nature, in the Deep South, "in terms of statewide elections, there's high racial polarization," says David Bositis, an expert on black politics at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Read more at NPR.

President Obama won a second term last week, but it wasn’t a great week for other African-American candidates.

Despite Obama’s big win, there remain no black senators, only one African-American was even nominated for major statewide office, and black candidates lost seven of eight competitive House races — six of them by very close margins.

The end result: the number of African-Americans in the House will likely remain the same in 2013 as it was this Congress.

As of this weekend, three of the eight House races that had yet to be called featured black Republicans. All of them appear to have lost.

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David Bositis, an expert on African-American politics at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said despite the close losses, there is reason for hope.

“Most years, black candidates get either large votes — 75 percent-plus — or small votes –10-30 percent,” Bositis said. “This year, there were quite a few black candidates who lost but got between 45 and 50 percent of the vote, which is very respectable.”

Read more at The Washington Post.

When black voters gave President Barack Obama 93 percent support on Election Day in defiance of predictions that they might sit it out this year, black leaders breathed a collective sigh of relief.

That encouraged those leaders to try to leverage more attention from both Obama and Congress. Although they waver over how much to demand from the president — particularly in light of defeated GOP challenger Mitt Romney's assertion that Obama gave "gifts" to minorities in exchange for their votes — they are delivering postelection wish lists to the president anyway.

"I think the president heard us loud and clear. The collective message was, 'Let's build on where we already are,'" the Rev. Al Sharpton told reporters after a White House meeting last week with a collection of advocates representing largely Democratic constituencies.

Specifically, Sharpton said, that means keeping the brunt of the looming "fiscal cliff" of tax increases and spending cuts off the backs of the middle and working class.

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Nationally, Obama's share of the black vote was down slightly from four years ago. But in some key states, turnout was higher and had an impact, said David Bositis, an expert on black politics and voting at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Blacks made up 15 percent of the electorate in Ohio, up from 11 percent in 2008. And 97 percent of those votes went for Obama, leading Bositis to say Obama's margin of victory in the state came from black voters.

In Michigan, the black share of the vote grew from 12 percent in 2008 to 16 percent in 2012, according to exit polls.

"Michigan was one of the states the two parties jostled around, and eventually Republicans decided they were not going to win, and one of the reasons was the big increase in the black vote," Bositis said.

Read more at U.S. News and World Report.

One month after the re-election of President Barack Obama, more than 40 Black leaders convened this week to begin crafting what appears to be a strategy by which to hold politicians accountable to a suffering Black community that has given overwhelming political allegiance to President Obama and the Democratic Party.

“We just concluded a historic four-hour discussion about the state of the nation, the state of Black America, the challenges and problems we face, as well as the excitement we feel about our ability to impact the challenges of now and the future,” National Urban League President/CEO Marc Morial began the afternoon press conference Dec. 3. “We embrace our historic role as the conscience of the nation and we are united in our mission to support and protect the well-being of the African-American community, low income and working class Americans across the nation.”

Immediately, Morial read a joint statement from the group, focusing on what politicians and economists are calling the “fiscal cliff”, a year-end convergence of tax hikes that could throw already economically destitute people into a tail spin.

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The meeting, led by Morial at a Washington, D.C. hotel, was convened by him, Melanie Campbell, president/CEO, the National Coalition of Black Civic Participation; the Rev. Al Sharpton, president/CEO, the National Action Network; and Ben Jealous, president/CEO of the NAACP. A string of other stalwart Black organizations were also represented, including the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies; the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law; the National Congress of Black Women; the Black Women’s Roundtable; the Hip Hop Caucus; and the Institute of the Black World – 21st Century.

Read more at Politic365.

In 2011, as Illinois politicians redrew congressional district maps, they exercised a power grab that was intended to protect those already in office or even gain more seats for Democrats.

Officials split some of the state's growing Latino population between districts already represented by Democrats and those where they hoped to see Republicans lose. An incumbent Democrat like former Chicago-area Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. was supposed to have little problem holding a seat that for three decades has been held by an African-American. But in 2011, no one knew then that Jackson would spend a portion his term in seclusion trying to manage a mental illness. And no one knew that, after winning reelection earlier this month, Jackson would resign amid allegations of misappropriated campaign funds.

Now, with Jackson out and Illinois set to stage a special election in February, Jackson’s former district could end up being represented by a white Democrat from Chicago’s suburbs. And for the crowded field of mostly black candidates that have expressed interest in Jackson’s old job, winning support of Latino voters and at least a smattering of white voters may be the key to victory.

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In the 1970s and 80s, political power struggles flared in cities around the country as whites decamped to the suburbs, said David Bositis, a senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. Minority voters were frequently divided among crowded fields of black candidates, leaving room for well-financed white candidates often backed by conservative business interests to win by narrow majorities, Bositis said.

That’s a pattern that dominated elections in cities like St. Louis for decades, according to Bositis. In the 1980s and 1990s, the number of black elected officials peaked in cities like Los Angeles. Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, cities like Baltimore and Gary, Ind. -- a city which was then about 90 percent black -- began to elect more liberal white politicians with substantial support from black voters. Black officeholders had to work harder to appeal to white liberals and, in the Dallas and Los Angeles areas, even fought to have them drawn into their once overwhelmingly black districts. Now, the growing presence of Latinos will likely spur a new political resort that begins with more politicians courting Latino voters and may later lead to an increase in Latino officeholders, Bositis said.

"But in a lot of places that’s still a ways off," Bositis said. "It’s not just about population numbers. Its also about age."

Read more at The Huffington Post.

We join with residents of California in mourning the loss of one of the state’s most remarkable leaders and a key figure in the founding of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in 1970, the Honorable Mervyn Dymally. For more than 40 years, he embodied the notion that anyone who works hard and plays by the rules can realize the American Dream.

A native of Trinidad, Congressman Dymally’s career in public service was marked by a series of “firsts.”  He was the first African American to serve in the California Senate and became the first to hold statewide elective office when he became Lieutenant Governor.  In the United States House of Representatives, he distinguished himself as a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee by championing the sanctions that helped end apartheid in South Africa. During his six terms in the House, he served as Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Congressman Dymally was a mentor to a generation of California politicians and an inspiration to public servants and civic leaders across the country.  We salute him for his lasting contributions.

The U.S. House of Representatives Ethics Committee, following a two-year investigation, has cleared U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) of alleged wrongdoing.

Their finding paves the way for her to become the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee and possibly its chairman if Democrats retake the House in the November election.

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Late last year when U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.) announced his retirement, it opened the door for Waters to become the ranking Democrat or possibly chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. It oversees the nation’s economy through the Federal Reserve Board, the U.S. Treasury and the production and distribution of currency.

Dr. David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank for black elected officials, said last year that Waters could gain the coveted post if the ethics committee cleared of the charges.

Read more at The North Star News.