This article is Part 2 in a two-part series reviewing Supreme Court ballot access decisions and the effects of the Court's precedents on independent and third party candidates. You can read Part 1 here.

The $1.1 billion bill to combat the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne illness causing encephalitis and birth defects, failed to clear the Senate as gridlock-as-usual resumes after the recess.

Senate Democrats forced the issue, by not allowing cloture, because of two added provisions to the bill -- one defunding Planned Parenthood, the other permitting Confederate flags to be flown at military cemeteries.

While no longer operative in the presidential election, the voter rebellion witnessed during the primaries is alive and well. South Dakota is now the epicenter, where Amendment V for Nonpartisan Elections gives voters the chance to reclaim their elections from the political establishment and send a message to Washington.

A circuit judge in Missouri on Friday overturned a primary election result, citing irregularities with absentee ballots. The decision exposed haphazard election practices in St. Louis.

The August 2 Democratic primary for the 78th district of the Missouri House of Representatives resulted in a 90-vote victory for incumbent Penny Hubbard. She defeated challenger Bruce Franks Jr., an activist in Ferguson, Missouri.

In recent years, there have been several top-down attempts to overturn the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United. That decision, made in 2010, birthed legal entities known as super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited sums of money so long as they do not coordinate with a candidate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laARZFcAwNw

Making an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday, former Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders told host Chuck Todd that he thinks the current polling threshold to gain entry into the presidential debates is too high.

From an independent perspective, the rules for inclusion in the presidential debates reeks of political cronyism and is emblematic of everything that is wrong with the two-party duopoly in the United States.

Since the 1960 campaign, when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon squared off in the first nationally televised debates, the media has taken a solid role in shaping how Americans view politics.

This election season has seen groundbreaking engagement of young people from across the political spectrum. At the moment, many are looking beyond the two establishment parties to Governor Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party.

I walked around downtown on a Comic-Con evening in July. It isn’t like any other convention you see; thousands of people, dressed up and dressed down, were roaming the Gaslamp and having a great time. It’s cool to live in a place that people pay to visit, and the events they attend can be world-class fun for us too. There were Comic-Con-related venues everywhere – in bars, museums, parking lots – not just on one convention center floor. No convention center floor, no matter how large, could have accommodated this carnival. It was so, um, non-contiguous.

Green Party ballot access campaigns have had more success in 2016 than ever before, according to Rick Lass, Ballot Access Coordinator for the Jill Stein campaign.

You can check out the Greens' infographic to see states turn green as each state's required signatures are submitted. So far, 43 states are green. Lass is sure that Greens will make it onto 44 state ballots, plus Washington, D.C.