Baobao Zhang, Maxwell Dean Associate Professor of the Politics of AI, says that the administration may have been willing to give up on the moratorium in order to push through the rest of the bill by its self-imposed Independence Day deadline.

“In theory, what we want is the election that really decides who is going to serve in government to be one that was a higher-turnout election where campaigns, candidates, platforms, policies made some sort of difference in the outcome,” says Assistant Teaching Professor Richard Barton. “But most of those general elections are just not competitive, and they’re not consequential.”

Ryan Griffiths, professor of political science, has co-written a new book, Before Colonization: Non-Western States and Systems in the Nineteenth Century (Columbia University Press, 2025). The book, written with Charles R. Butcher, challenges the Eurocentric view of the world by offering a comparative analysis of non-Western state systems in the 19th century, supported by an original dataset.