Late Monday night, the Supreme Court handed American voters one of the biggest wins of the year, and it did so in two quiet sentences. The President’s plan to put the Postal Service in charge of screening your mail ballot is blocked for the 2026 elections.

If you’ve been reading Bright America for a while, you know we’ve been following (and fueling) this fight all summer — and here’s what you should know:

The plan, in plain English

Back on March 31, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at mail voting. It directed the Postal Service to write new rules for how ballots travel through the mail. The final version of those rules landed on August 21, about ten weeks before Election Day, over the objections of more than 200,000 public comments.

The rules said every mail ballot envelope in the country would need a special logo, a machine-readable design, and a unique barcode tied to each individual voter. Every state would have to upload the name and address of every mail voter into a new federal “Ballot Portal” run by the post office. Then, before accepting any ballot mail, postal workers would check each envelope against that list. Envelopes that failed the check would be refused and sent back.

For as long as mail voting has existed, the roles have been clear. Election officials decide who is eligible to receive a ballot. The post office delivers it, the same way it delivers your birthday cards and jury summonses. Under the new rules, the post office would suddenly sit in judgment of ballots, with the power to turn them away. And the federal government would hold a national list of everyone who votes by mail, built inside an agency the president had already ordered to restrict the practice.

More than 50 million pieces of ballot mail are expected to move through the postal system this election. That’s how much was suddenly up for review.

Sixty days is not enough time to rewire an election

Our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center (CLC), the nonpartisan legal nonprofit you’ve met in these pages before, put an expert named Tammy Patrick in front of the court. Patrick has spent more than twenty years working where elections and the mail meet, and President Obama once appointed her to a bipartisan commission on election administration. Her assessment of the rule was blunt. It was “unprecedented,” and implementing it before November would be “virtually impossible.”

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The details from her declaration read like a prank on local governments. Election offices could no longer hand ballot trays to their own mail carrier or use a collection box. They would have to haul everything to special postal counters. If a single envelope in a mailing failed inspection, the entire mailing could be rejected. Travis County, Texas had already spent $21,349 on envelopes that would have become useless overnight. The election office in Madison, Wisconsin was looking at more than $10,000 to reprint theirs. North Carolina started mailing ballots on September 4, while the ink on the rule was barely dry.

This wasn’t a partisan panic, either. Ricky Hatch, the Republican county clerk in Weber County, Utah, told the New York Times he had drawn up plans to abandon mail voting entirely if the rule survived. Seven secretaries of state from Republican-led states asked the courts to stop it.

Two courts said no in a single weekend

On September 13, a federal judge in Washington blocked the rule in the case Campaign Legal Center brought with its co-counsel on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a military families group called Secure Families Initiative, the Arizona Students’ Association, the city of Madison, and Travis County. The judge was Carl Nichols, whom President Trump appointed during his first term. His reasoning was almost elegant in its simplicity. Congress created the Postal Service to deliver mail. No law anywhere gives it the power to run a voter enrollment system or refuse lawful ballots. Lawyers call that acting “ultra vires,” which is Latin for beyond your powers. The rest of us might call it staying in your lane.

The next evening, the Supreme Court declined to rescue the rule in a parallel case brought by California and other states. The Court said plainly that the government is “unlikely to succeed” in defending it. Justice Brett Kavanaugh added that forcing the rule onto this election would be “arbitrary and capricious” because officials simply have no time to comply. Only Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. All three of the president’s own Supreme Court appointees let the block stand without a word of protest.

Where a dollar does the most work

Every election year, billions of dollars pour into campaigns. Those races matter, and we’re not telling anyone to stop caring about them. But think about what this one legal fight just protected — mail ballots for tens of millions of voters. In all fifty states. In every race on every ballot, from the Senate down to the school board. No campaign, no matter how well funded, can win an election where the ballots never arrive.

John Adams wrote that we should be “a government of laws, and not of men.”

When the rules themselves are under attack, defending the rules has to come first, because every hard-fought victory at the polls depends on the votes being delivered, counted, and honored. This is why Bright America treats strategic litigation as core infrastructure for democracy, and why we’re so proud to help fuel the work Campaign Legal Center is doing in courtrooms across the country. Because a political campaign contribution helps one candidate in one race for one cycle; while a lawsuit won protects every voter in every race, sometimes for a generation.

More is coming, and that’s exactly why this matters

Monday’s order blocks the rule for this election while the lawsuits continue, and Justice Kavanaugh left the door open for a future version with better timing. The same executive order also contains other schemes still working their way through the system, including a federal “citizenship list” built from famously unreliable databases. Nobody involved in this work is spiking the football and going home.

We should and do expect more of this in the days and weeks before the midterms, and more after that. When one scheme to meddle with our elections gets blocked, this administration reaches for the next one. The attacks are coming faster than at any point in living memory, and they are drawn up by people with the full power of the federal government behind them.

The reason those attacks keep failing is the deep bench of brilliant, prepared, relentless lawyers who wake up every morning and go to work defending our rights, our freedoms, and the Constitution itself. They read every new rule the moment it drops. They have plaintiffs lined up, experts like Tammy Patrick on call, and briefs half-drafted before the other side finishes its press release. That is how a rule published on August 21 could be dead in the water by September 14. Speed like that takes years of quiet preparation, and preparation takes steady support.

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To put it bluntly, without these lawyers, the republic would almost certainly be lost already. With them, and with the people who fund their fights — our fights — it holds.

But this morning, ballots are already in the mail in more than a dozen states, headed to kitchen tables where voters will fill them out in peace. The referees held. The rules held. Your investment in the rule of law held.

We’ll take the win — but we’re not abandoning the watchtower.

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I’ve sat on both sides of an election. As a precinct chairman, I watched poll workers execute a process they’d trained on for months. As a congressional chief of staff, I worked with county officials who plan mail ballot logistics a year out — not a season out. Elections are powered by preparation. So when you change the rules at the last minute (in the name of “security” - ha!), what you create is confusion.

And confusion is exactly what you need to breed if you’re needing to discredit an election.

That’s what’s happening right now.

On August 21st, the U.S. Postal Service published a final rule reshaping how mail-in ballots move through the system, including a new authority for itself to reject ballots before they even get to an election official. A federal judge in Massachusetts blocked it September 4th, but the Administration refuses to back off. It went to the Supreme Court this week asking to implement the rule anyway, with a ruling possibly landing within days.

Our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center (CLC), along with roughly two dozen states, are suing over this. The arguments are obvious and should prevail: the Constitution gives states and Congress power over elections, not the president, and USPS is supposed to answer to voters, not the West Wing. CLC already beat back one Trump election order in court — and we’re confident this will be the next.

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Here’s what still has me worried: County election offices don’t get to wait for the Supreme Court to sort this out before printing ballots and setting up mail processing. Some of them are already deep into midterm prep. A last-minute ruling either way forces them to scramble, and scrambling is where mistakes happen. And every mistake becomes a talking point for someone who wants to argue the result was rigged.

Republican and Democratic election officials alike have said their systems already work. The people running elections on the ground are the ones telling Washington to leave the process alone this close to a vote.

An independent judiciary exists for exactly this moment — to decide whether the executive branch can rewrite election rules by fiat weeks before Americans vote, without turning the decision into a campaign issue. CLC is putting that question in front of the courts on behalf of every voter, not one side’s voters.

The strength of American elections has never been that they’re perfect. It’s that they’re stable enough for people to trust the count. If we allow anyone to mess with that stability this close to Election Day, we open the door to chaos, and chaos is the one thing nobody in this fight can afford.

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Every year, a small federal office most have never heard of sends a questionnaire to more than 140 agencies across the executive branch. It’s called the Office of Government Ethics, and the questionnaire is essentially a report card.

How many ethics officials do you have on staff?

How many of your senior people filed their financial disclosure forms?

How many times did you let someone off the hook for a conflict of interest?

How many possible crimes did you send to the Justice Department, and what happened to them?

The answers for 2025 are in, and our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center (CLC) spent the summer reading them. What they found was quieter than a scandal and yet, I think, more worrying. The federal government’s system for catching corruption is slowly being turned into an honor system, one missing form at a time.

Follow the money… unless you can’t

Start with the forms, because the forms are where the money hides.

When someone takes a senior job in the federal government, they have to disclose to the public what they own, what they owe, and who has been paying them. That document is called a public financial disclosure report, and while it is often quite dull paperwork, it’s also the single best tool the public has for spotting an official who is making decisions that help their own bank account. If the person overseeing a drug approval owns a pile of stock in the drug company, the form is how we find out. If the person writing a defense contract just left the contractor’s payroll, the form is how we find out.

In 2024, 110 of those reports were never filed. By contrast, in 2025, that number quadrupled to 418. Why would four times as many senior officials in the Trump Administration choose to simply ignore the law and fail to disclose their finances? Among a group of part-time advisers the government calls “special government employees,” compliance dropped from 100 percent to 82 percent in a single year. These are often the outside experts and business people brought in to advise on policy, which makes them exactly the group most likely to have a personal stake in the outcome.

I want to be fair about this. A missing form does not prove that anyone did anything wrong. It does prove that nobody could have caught them if they had, and catching them is the entire reason the form exists.

Riding the Waiver

Then there are the waivers. Federal law makes it a crime for an official to work on a matter where they have a personal financial interest. Agencies are allowed to waive that rule in narrow cases, when the interest is so small or so far removed that it could not realistically sway anyone. Those waivers are supposed to be rare. From 2021 through 2024, agencies issued about 120 of them a year, and in 2025 they issued 249. Roughly twice as many people were told, in writing, that the conflict-of-interest law would not apply to them this time.

And when agencies do find something that looks like a crime, the law requires them to refer it to the Justice Department. In 2025, agencies referred 141 possible criminal ethics violations, and the Justice Department declined to prosecute 94% of them. The Treasury Department alone sent 81 cases, and prosecutors passed on all but six.

Put those three numbers together and you can see the shape of the problem. Fewer people are telling us what they own. More people are getting permission to act on their conflicts anyway. And the rare cases that do get flagged as crimes are mostly going nowhere.

None of that happens by accident, because somebody has to chase the missing forms, review the waivers, and make the referrals. Those somebodies are the agency ethics officials, and there are 274 fewer of them than there were a year ago. The Department of Education lost 60 percent of its ethics staff, Treasury lost 44 percent, and the White House went from 18 ethics officials to four. Forty percent of ethics offices told the government they no longer have the resources to do the job.

At the top of each agency’s ethics program sits a person with the clunky title of Designated Agency Ethics Official. For decades, that job went to career civil servants, people who had spent years learning a thick body of law that confuses even the lawyers. But in 2025, one in five of those jobs was held by a political appointee, up from about one in seven the year before. At Homeland Security, Education, Energy, and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the new ethics chiefs appear to have no prior federal ethics experience at all. At the CIA, Health and Human Services, Labor, and Treasury, the position was simply empty.

If you want a sports metaphor, this is a game where most of the referees have been sent home, and many of the refs still on the field were hired by one of the teams. The rulebook is still sitting on the table, and fewer and fewer people are bothering to open it.

I think people sometimes hear the word “ethics” and picture something soft, like the training video you click through on your first day at a new job. The federal ethics program is a much harder thing than that. It is the part of government that stands between your tax dollars and the people who would like to help themselves to them. It is what sends a contract to the best bidder rather than the bidder who golfs with the agency director. It is what keeps a reviewer from waving through a product they happen to own shares in. When that program weakens, the losses rarely show up as a headline. They show up as a slightly worse deal, a slightly slower approval, a slightly more expensive project, repeated thousands of times across the government, with no way to trace any of it back.

That is what an honor system costs. It works beautifully as long as everyone involved is honorable, and it costs nothing to run, which is exactly its appeal to the people who benefit from it.

CLC is leading our movement in asking Congress for two things:

1) An independent ethics body for the executive branch, with real investigators, real enforcement power, and leaders who cannot be fired for doing their jobs. Right now the Office of Government Ethics can write the rules and collect the questionnaire, but it has very little power to investigate anyone or punish them for breaking those rules.

2) Close the revolving door, so a lobbyist cannot walk straight from an industry into the office that regulates it.

Neither idea is new, and neither is partisan. Every administration eventually leaves, and whatever rules we let slide now will be waiting for the next one, whoever that turns out to be. The question underneath all these numbers is a simple one. Do we want to know what the people running our government own and owe, or would we rather take their word for it?

I would rather know, and the forms are sitting right there just waiting to be filled out.

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On Monday, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration something it had been asking for, and by Tuesday (yesterday), our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center (CLC) had already filed a 71-page lawsuit in response. I want to walk through both of those things, but I’m going to spend most of my time on the second one, because that lawsuit is where the real fight is happening now.

Let’s start with what the Court did.

Back in March, President Trump signed an executive order that does two things that should sound strange to anyone who has ever voted. The first part tells the Department of Homeland Security to build federal lists of who counts as a citizen (from a trove of haphazardly compiled and often erroneous data). The second part tells the United States Postal Service, the same people who deliver your catalogs and birthday cards, to stop delivering mail ballots to anyone whose name doesn’t match up with the new, faulty system.

Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia sued to stop it. In June, a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the order, explaining that the Constitution explicitly gives the job of running elections to the states and to Congress, not to the president. She also pointed out that the government had offered no evidence at all of fraud in mail voting, which was supposed to be the whole reason for the order. An appeals court agreed with her. The administration then rushed to the Supreme Court on its emergency docket, and on August 24th a 6-to-3 majority lifted her block.

It’s important you don’t stop reading now, because this is the part that matters most and a lot of the news coverage got wrong.

The Supreme Court did not say the president’s executive order is legal. What it said was that the states had sued too early, before the Post Office had actually written its rules, so there was nothing concrete enough yet for anyone to be harmed by. The unsigned opinion even added that nothing about the decision “means that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful.” In the Court’s own words, “On that score, time will tell.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing for the three justices who disagreed, warned that the majority “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.” I think she is right about that, but the majority’s own careful wording is the thing worth holding onto. The justices answered a question about timing, and they left the bigger question about power for another day.

The funny thing about a timing problem is that it tends to fix itself.

The Postal Service put out its final rule on Friday, August 21, and it was printed in the Federal Register today. The “too soon” argument that won the government its victory at the Supreme Court has now disappeared, because there is an actual rule on the books that anyone can read.

That is why, less than a day after the Supreme Court acted, our strategic litigation partner CLC filed a new complaint in federal court. This is exactly what Bright America members are funding with donations and subscriptions!

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From “Bad Idea” to “Absurd Idea”

Under the Post Office’s new rule, before a state can mail out a single ballot, its election officials have to log into a brand-new website called the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and enroll every mail voter by name and address. Each voter then needs a special Postal Service barcode on the envelope going out and a second one on the envelope coming back. Every batch of ballots requires its own separate upload. If a barcode on an envelope doesn’t match a name on the list, the Post Office refuses to take it and sends it back to the clerk.

The portal, as I write this, does not exist yet.

Most states have laws dictating when they have to start mailing ballots (for example, North Carolina, by law, has to start mailing ballots on September 4). The rule also says that Post Office workers will scan those barcodes one at a time at the loading dock; that scanning “generally takes less than a minute per mailpiece”; and that the election official should stay on site while it happens. The complaint does the math for us. Maricopa County, Arizona, expects to send about 2.6 million pieces of mail in its first batch of ballots. At one minute apiece, the county recorder would be standing at the postal facility for nearly five years. Even at one second apiece, it would take thirty days.

Madison’s clerk has already bought every envelope she needs for November. Those envelopes don’t have the new barcode, and she has no legal power to redesign them, because Wisconsin’s statewide system controls the design. Reprinting them would cost more than $10,000 that the city has already spent once, and the supplier needs three to nine months of lead time she simply doesn’t have before her September 17 mailing date. Over in Travis County, the barcodes the clerk already uses aren’t compatible with the Post Office’s format, and her scanners can’t read the new kind.

None of this is a guess about what might go wrong. It is what happens when you ask a mail carrier (that can barely deliver the mail) to run an election with ten weeks’ notice.

The lawsuit makes eight separate legal claims that can be summed up in a few bullets:

☑️ CLC argues that the Postal Service has no constitutional authority to write election rules at all, because the Constitution hands that job to the states and to Congress.

☑️ The rest of the claims go after the Post Office rule under ordinary administrative law.

☑️ The Post Office, which would be refusing to carry some Americans’ ballots, is breaking its own legal duty to serve everyone.

☑️ A claim under the Voting Rights Act that turning ballots away at the Post Office amounts to refusing to let eligible voters vote.

More than 200,000 people wrote in to comment on the proposed version of this rule over the summer, and the Postal Service changed almost nothing in response.

Anna Baldwin, who leads voting rights litigation at CLC, called the Supreme Court’s order “lawless” and said her team “will not let the president’s dangerous anti-voter agenda go unchecked.”

The president’s executive order remains unconstitutional, and the Postal Service cannot launder it into a rule that blocks mail ballots weeks before an election.

Sarah Streyder of Secure Families Initiative pointed to the particular cruelty of making it harder for deployed troops and their families to vote from overseas, since those are exactly the people who depend most on mail ballots.

I’ll say the part that everyone in this fight already understands. From the very beginning, the administration’s strategy has been to run out the clock. If the rule comes out late enough, no court can fully stop it before ballots go in the mail, and the confusion does the rest of the work on its own. The Supreme Court’s timing decision, whatever the justices meant by it, fit that strategy perfectly.

And what CLC, with our movement behind them, did on Tuesday was refuse to let the clock decide the whole game. They filed on the very day the rule became something a court could review, in front of the same judge in Washington who told them back in the spring that they would have to wait for a final rule. Now there is one, and they are back in his courtroom.

If you vote by mail this fall, I have two practical suggestions. Nothing about Monday’s decision changes your ability to request or cast a ballot right now, so don’t let the headlines scare you off. And given what the Postal Service is being asked to do to itself, request your ballot early and send it back early. The people who run your county’s elections are already doing their part, and so are the lawyers.

The least the rest of us can do is not wait around.

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A wrecking ball swung into the East Wing of the White House in October 2025, and with it went more than just the historic offices of the First Lady. In its place, the administration proposed a 90,000-square-foot ballroom — a monument to legacy, sure, but more alarmingly, a monument to the highest bidder.

Because Congress never authorized or funded this vanity project, the administration decided to crowdsource it. Nearly $400 million has been raised from a cocktail of corporate giants and private donors, including Meta, Coinbase, Ripple, and Lockheed Martin. But as any seasoned observer of Washington knows: there is no such thing as a free ballroom.

What we are witnessing is the literal privatization of the People’s House. It serves as the crown jewel of what the Campaign Legal Center’s Pay-to-Play Tracker describes as a brazen era of transactional governance.

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When you bypass the congressional power of the purse — a constitutional safeguard designed specifically to prevent this exact flavor of corruption — you enter dangerous territory. The tracker maps out a bleak landscape where seven-figure checks to affiliated PACs or inaugural funds have seemingly become the price of admission for cabinet appointments, ambassadorships, dropped investigations, and even presidential pardons.

Just look at Coinbase. The cryptocurrency giant and its major investors poured $12 million into a Trump-affiliated Super PAC, $1 million into the Inaugural Fund, and an undisclosed sum into the ballroom project. By February 2025, the SEC had conveniently dropped a civil enforcement action against the company. Coincidence? That’s a tough sell.

Fortunately, the guardrails of democracy, though dented, are still holding, and our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center (CLC) is taking the fight to the courts. In the ongoing lawsuit National Trust for Historic Preservation v. National Park Service, watchdogs have stepped in to defend the separation of powers. In CLC’s Amicus Brief, it laid out the stakes clearly: allowing a president to bypass Congress and fund public projects with private, interested money is a fast track to corrupt bargains.

Just this week, CLC doubled down with a filing at the Supreme Court to keep the construction halted. As CLC argued, the Constitution vests the power of the purse in Congress for a reason — to keep the government working for the people, not a shadowy board of underwriters.

We fight for a “Bright America” not because the sun is always shining on Washington, but because our system was built with the flashlights necessary to expose the rot. The fix isn’t a mystery; it’s a matter of will.

We need presidents to divest from conflicting financial interests or use blind trusts. We need a rejuvenated Federal Election Commission with actual teeth, and a complete overhaul of the dark-money floodgates opened by Citizens United. Until then, we rely on the courts and relentless watchdogs to remind those in power that the White House isn’t a timeshare for special interests.

It belongs to us. Let’s keep the lights on.

During the 2024 election, Donald Trump made two promises that people remember: 1) prices would come down, and 2) he would keep us out of war. And now, it’s time for voters to grade him on both.

Groceries, rent, insurance, and the electric bill have not gotten easier for anyone I know, and the country has spent this year watching military commitments grow rather than wind down. When a party is failing at the kitchen table and on questions of war and peace at the same time, midterm elections tend to become waves, and that is what I expect this one to be.

And while I do feel quite strongly about who I hope will win in November, I also know an ever more important thing is us finding our way back to all Americans being able to look at the result — disappointed or not — and believe it was free and fair.

But an expectation of a massive electoral shift is worth precisely nothing if the machinery that turns votes into results gets jammed, and there are a great many people working, at this very moment, to jam it.

That is why I’m so focused on the work of our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center, which is at the forefront of the most important work we can be doing to preserve democracy.

While there’s plenty to worry about, I hope the vigilance of those in our election protection litigation community give you some comfort and hope that we can and will get through this:

“What if DOJ seizes ballots or voting machines?”

This is not a hypothetical, since we have already watched a version of it play out in Fulton County.

The pressure point, though, is smaller than most people realize. A federal seizure requires a magistrate judge’s signature on a warrant, often with no public notice and very little time for reflection, which is why legal teams are putting briefing materials in front of magistrate judges now, so that a legally thin or politically motivated application will meet real scrutiny rather than a rubber stamp.

Running beneath all of this is DOJ’s effort to build a national voter database, a tool that could be used to force purges on the basis of sloppy name matches and to manufacture doubt about the count after the fact. Multiple lawsuits have been brought against both of Trump's election executive orders, and CLC has been central to that fight, winning rulings that struck down the proof-of-citizenship requirement and the provision targeting military and overseas voters, and pressing a pending challenge to the 2026 order's national citizen database and mail-ballot restrictions.

I would add that the record on this front is considerably better than the anxiety suggests. Core provisions of both anti-voting executive orders have been blocked, and DOJ now stands at 0 for 22 in its lawsuits demanding that states hand over their voter rolls. Those twenty-two victories did not simply happen. Wins like these are only possible because somebody filed, somebody argued, and somebody paid for it, and that somebody is people like you and me!

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“What if federal agents show up at my polling place?”

Because speed is everything here, our partners have shell pleadings drafted and ready to file immediately, whether the trigger is ICE at a polling site or a surge of federal agents into a competitive district under the banner of immigration enforcement.

There is a second track that I find encouraging. A growing number of states have adopted legislation allowing ordinary people to sue federal officials who violate their constitutional rights. The New York Times called it “a law that might just save the midterms.” An agent who knows he can be held personally liable behaves rather differently than one who assumes the badge covers everything.

The drill you hope you never run

None of this guarantees a calm November, but I would ask you to notice what all of it has in common: Preparation. And while being well-prepared is neither glamorous nor cheap, it is exactly what needs to be done. That’s why your support is so important right now.

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Three things you can do this week

1. Fuel the legal work. Every filing and every state guide costs money, and Bright America members are the reason it gets funded.

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2. Call your legislators. Ask them where they stand on protecting election officials from federal interference. Names, numbers, and our calling guide are here.

3. Send this to one person who is anxious about November, ideally someone who doesn’t vote the way you do, because the result has to be believable to all of us.

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Have you been to a naturalization ceremony? I haven’t and I worked in Congress for 20 years, where I routinely witnessed many of the functions of government… which leads me to believe most Americans haven’t, either.

I have, however, spoken to many people who have attended as either newly sworn-in Americans, witnesses, or public officials. And the common thing I hear is that there’s a special feeling in the room — with people from everywhere, all dressed up, nervous, beaming with pride, holding little American flags. They take the oath after a years- or decades-long obstacle course and just like that, they’re Americans.

And for as long as anyone can remember, a key feature of these ceremonies has been volunteers from the non-partisan League of Women Voters who have been waiting right outside with a special question that most of us take for granted:

“Would you like to register to vote?”

For thousands of new citizens every year, that’s their first act as an American. It happens minutes after they become one.

Yet, last August, the Trump administration tried to put a stop to it when U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) barred nonpartisan groups like the League from helping new citizens register to vote after naturalization ceremonies. Instead, only local election officials would be allowed to, and in much of the country, election officials don’t have the staff to show up (and have never needed to). That’s the whole reason the League has been doing this work for decades, since before USCIS even existed.

The effect was immediate, with Leagues across the country canceled registration drives. And the numbers tell you what was really at stake. In 2024, League volunteers held nearly 3,000 events at naturalization ceremonies and helped more than 122,000 new citizens register.

Nobody streamlines that away by accident.

So our movement sued

This is where Campaign Legal Center (CLC), our strategic litigation partner, comes in.

In November, CLC filed suit on behalf of the national League and Leagues in Colorado, New Jersey, Saratoga County, the Charleston area, and Milwaukee County. The argument was simple: helping people register to vote is speech. It’s protected by the First Amendment, for organizations as much as for individuals, and the government doesn’t get to order civic groups to knock it off.

CLC also went after how the rule was made. Federal agencies can’t just change the rules on a whim. The Administrative Procedure Act requires notice, public comment, and actual reasoning. USCIS skipped all of it.

Last week (August 3, 2026), a federal judge agreed and blocked the policy while the case moves forward, finding it arbitrary, likely unconstitutional, and adopted without anything close to the required process.

That means the League is back at these ceremonies — tables up, clipboards out!

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Why YOU should share this good news

There are three important reasons you should share this good news (and they’re the same reason I’m writing about this right now)…

1️⃣ Because good news deserves to be shared, and there hasn’t been enough of it

2️⃣ Good news breeds hope, and hope keeps the fight for our freedoms alive and well

3️⃣ At a time when Congress has abandoned its role, and the Executive is abusing power, this type of litigation is how REAL change happens right now

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We are living through a stretch where we can’t count on elections alone to protect our rights. That’s a hard thing to say out loud, but you already know it’s true. What this case shows is that the courts still work when someone shows up prepared to fight, and that our Constitution and laws still have teeth when skilled lawyers sink them in.

That doesn’t happen on its own. It takes organizations like CLC that build cases carefully, know the law cold, and have earned the trust of partners like the League. And it takes people like you, because litigation like this runs on the support of a movement. Your attention, your sharing, your donations. That’s the fuel.

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We should be honest about where things stand. This is a preliminary injunction, not a final ruling. CLC and the Leagues still have to win the case outright, and then there will likely be appeals — not to mention that this administration will continue looking for new ways to make voting harder. Nobody at CLC is spiking the football, and neither are we.

But a year ago, the government told nonpartisan volunteers to stop helping new Americans vote. And now, a court has told the government to stand down. That happened because people fought back, and it’s a fight we can win again, because the strategy that won it is repeatable.

Somewhere this week, someone will take the oath, walk out of the ceremony, and register to vote at a folding table that wasn’t supposed to be there. And in the time we’re in, and as challenging as it may be, that’s worth celebrating.

Share this one. People need the reminder that we’re not powerless.

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Earlier this week I wrote about conservative provocateur and Trump-whisperer Laura Loomer standing in a Kyiv bomb shelter, telling the Associated Press that Russian propaganda had bamboozeled her. Loomer’s acknowledgment confirmed what many of us already intuited: Putin’s Russia was hiding in plain sight within many conservative media outlets. And the concrete proof came in the form of a federal indictment that finally showed some of us how it got there — $9.7 million of Kremlin money, one Tennessee company, two thousand videos, and six American commentators who say they had no idea.

I ended on a sour note: the government watchtowers that we rely on to scan for this are unmanned.

So what do we actually do?

Before I answer that, I want to be straighter with you than most people writing about this are willing to be. The evidence here is contested. A fair amount of it says “less than you’d hope.” And I’d rather you hear the weaknesses in my own argument from me than from someone who’s arguing with me.

So let’s start with the strongest case against my position.

In 2024, a group of political scientists — Ceren Budak, Brendan Nyhan, and Andy Guess, among others — published a review in Nature arguing that exposure to flatly false content online is rarer than most of us assume, and heavily concentrated in a small group of people who were already out at the far end of things. Their argument is that the engine here is demand, not supply, and that the real damage gets done by domestic elites with microphones.

In other words, most of the consequential false things Americans believe were said out loud, on camera, by other Americans.

Now for the good news, which corrects something you’ve probably heard secondhand. You may have heard of the “backfire effect” — the idea that correcting somebody makes them dig in and believe the wrong thing even harder. Yet, two political scientists, Thomas Wood and Ethan Porter, went looking for it across 52 different issues with more than ten thousand people and couldn’t produce it.

So correct the record — because It does move people. And while it rarely erases a belief outright, it can soften people to eventually accept the truth.

Get There First

The idea comes from immunology, which is why researchers call it “inoculation”.

A vaccine works by showing your immune system a weakened version of a threat, so that when the real one arrives, your body already knows the shape of it. Prebuttal does the same thing to counter lies. You show people the con in advance, in a small and harmless dose, so that when somebody runs it on them for real, something in the back of the mind goes: wait, I’ve seen this before.

There are two ways to do it. You can inoculate against a specific claim — here’s what they’re going to tell you about the voting machines in October, and here’s why it’s wrong. That works, but it only protects against the one claim, and there are always more claims.

Or you can inoculate against the technique, which is the version I’d put money on.

It might look something like “Here’s what a manufactured outrage clip looks like, and here’s how you can tell somebody edited it” or “Here’s how a fake local news site gets built — the county name in the URL, the stock photo masthead, the three real stories on top of one fabricated one” or “Here’s what it looks like when a stranger halfway around the world is working to make you feel like your neighbor is your enemy.”

When people understand a pattern, you don’t have to be able to predict the exact lie that may be told.

Messenger > Message

The messenger often matters more than the message. In a 2021 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers tested vaccine messaging on Republicans. When the endorsement of vaccines came from a Republican elected official, intent to get vaccinated moved up about seven points. The identical message from a Democrat produced backlash — it pushed people the wrong direction.

Same words. Opposite result. The only variable was whose mouth they came out of.

And yet every instinct in American politics rigrht now is to send the most credentialed person available to go explain things to people who have no use for credentials. It doesn’t work — and perhaps it never did. The person who can reach a skeptical conservative on election integrity is a conservative — and preferably one that person might run into at church, or at work, or in a social setting.

Where Trust Still Lives

This is why Bright America is putting its efforts into local communities.

I’m sure you’re aware that the supply of local news in many places across the country is collapsing. But in the Reuters Institute’s survey work, local and regional outlets still post the highest trust of any category of news — year after year, across the map.

Local news is trusted — but it’s disappearing.

We’re partnering with local newsrooms to make prebuttal content in the form people actually consume: short and native to the platform; hosted by a real person with a name and a face, put where the audience already is.

We’re not waiting on national media to carry this. I hold no grudge against it, and I’d much rather it were healthy than sick. But the numbers say plainly that it can’t reach the people who most need reaching. An 8 percent trust rating is hardly a promising distribution channel.

Help Support Our Local Work

The rest of us are going to have to get more literate about our own heads, too. And I mean that without the sneer that usually attaches to “do your research.” What you scroll changes what you think. The people you find most trustworthy were selected for you by a recommendation engine that has no opinion about whether they’re right. And there are foreign governments spending massive amounts of money on a bet that they can use that against you.

Say It Before November

I want to end where I started, because that’s the hopeful part.

It is not an easy thing to admit you’ve been fooled. And that’s because, all too often, it can feel internally and externally like saying “I’m a fool.”

That’s why I’m proud of the conservatives who have moved off Russia’s anti-Ukraine talking points. It’s not just Laura Loomer, but members of Congress, veterans, writers, local officials (and on and on) who took a fresh look at where the arguments came from and had the nerve to say in public that they’d been played. We should be gracious when people are willing to change course — and not just because it’s the kind thing to do, but because these people become the most compelling messengers to the rest of the public who may have been fooled also.

And now I’d like to see a lot more of this, but on a much more challenging subject given the President’s sensitivities…

We need conservatives to speak up about election denialism, and we need them to do it before the claims arrive — not in the wreckage afterward. That’s the whole idea of prebuttal. It means being willing to say now, in August, what we’re all going to be told in November: that the counts are slow because the law requires it, that a lead changing overnight is the system working exactly the way it was built to work, and that your county clerk is not a criminal.

And yes, it means being willing to prebut the President. He is still the single most powerful voice in conservative politics. I expect that to change, because nobody’s influence is permanent and second terms end. When it recedes, something will fill the space. What fills it is being decided right now, by whoever bothers to do the work of building a network.

Our best assets are sitting in places Washington doesn’t spend much time thinking about. The business owner, he sheriff, the county commissioner, the pastor, the woman who’s run the Chamber of Commerce for twenty years and knows everybody’s kids by name. These are people with standing in an actual place — and standing is about the only currency left that still buys anything.

Building that network is the work — not a theory of a network. An actual list of actual people, in specific counties, prepared and willing to speak before the fire starts.

Laura Loomer had to stand in a bomb shelter in Kyiv to see what had been done to her. Most people are never going to get that.

What they’ll get is whatever we manage to put in front of them first.

So let’s be first.

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Last week, Laura Loomer went to Kyiv.

If her name means nothing to you, you should know it means a great deal to a few million people online. Loomer is a highly controversial right-wing activist who built a career out of confrontation — from spreading conspiracy theories, to being thrown out of congressional hearings to being banned and eventually reinstated on most of the major platforms to two failed runs for Congress in Florida — and has had the President’s ear (resulting in some key firings for insufficient loyalty). She is not a journalist and wouldn’t claim to be. But she is loud, and for most of the last decade that was enough to make her one of the more audible voices on the online right.

For five years, what she told her audience about Ukraine ran roughly like this: corrupt country, crawling with Nazis, not worth an American dollar. She floated the idea that Putin should just take the whole thing. She wrote op-eds for RT, the Kremlin’s English-language international network.

And then, last week, she sat across from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with a camera rolling and told him she had been…

“bamboozled by Russian propaganda.”

She used to think Ukraine was full of Nazis, she said. She doesn’t anymore. Later, after a ballistic missile alert pushed her interview with the Associated Press out of her hotel and down into the building’s bomb shelter, she explained how it had happened:

Once upon a time, Laura Loomer got kicked off the conventional American social media platforms, and found herself on Telegram — because that was what was left. But what she may not have realized is that Telegram is where Russian material circulates freely. The Russians, she said, are very good at capitalizing on people’s rage. And she was angry.

She also wrote something a truth that still hasn’t been realized by many in our country:

“We have been so propagandized by Russia, and we don’t even realize it.”

Some caution is in order here. The reversal is days old and I have no idea whether it will hold. I’m not the audience for it either — I don’t trust her, and I’d be surprised if that changes. But a lot of people do, and if one conservative influencer, who has spent years vilifying Ukraine based on lies Russia fed her, can publicly make this stark of a reversal, it’s — dare I say — encouraging.

What the trip mostly left me with is a question I’ve been chewing on for four years. My entire career on Capitol Hill was spent in rooms where nobody had to be talked into the idea that Russia was our adversary.

So what happened?

I worked on Capitol Hill for Republicans for nearly 20 years. In every room I was ever in — foreign affairs meetings, staff briefings, the ordinary griping that fills an office on a Thursday afternoon — Russia was the red menace. There was no question that Putin was a bad actor and you didn’t have to argue for it.

Rush Limbaugh, perhaps the most influential conservative media figure for decades, told his audience day-after-day that Putin couldn’t be trusted (KGB man, playing a long game, any flattery drifting over from Moscow was part of the con, etc.). Millions of conservatives heard that on repeat for years — it was just a fact.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, and inside of a week I started hearing an argument I had never heard in my life.

It went like this… “Russia was actually building something enviable. A society ordered around Christian faith. A place that had refused the decadence we’d let take root here. Putin was the last man standing for a civilization the West had walked away from, and Ukraine was a corrupt client state of the same corrupt global order that had wrecked our own country.”

Hearing an argument like this was incredibly strange — most of all because it came out of nowhere. It arrived whole, talking points already attached, at the precise moment it became useful to Moscow.

In those early days of the war, I spearheaded an effort to raise a few hundred thousand dollars in charitable giving for Ukraine — food and medicine, ambulances, medical supplies, and other things you might need if there’s a hole in your apartment building. This seemed like something 100% of Congress could support, and yet I can vividly remember standing inside the Capitol listening to the Kremlin’s arguments come out of the mouth of a Member of Congress.

It made me sick, and was really beyond comprehension. Surely he couldn’t believe what he was saying, right? The only person who could repeat lies like that must be a Russian asset. But we now know there’s another explanation.

Follow the Money

On September 4, 2024, the Justice Department unsealed charges against two employees of RT. The allegation was that RT had secretly bankrolled a Tennessee company called Tenet Media to the tune of roughly $9.7 million, which was nearly every dollar the company ever took in. The money moved through an investor who didn’t exist, invented for the purpose. Tenet Media put out something close to two thousand videos and pulled more than sixteen million views on YouTube alone.

The six American commentators on Tenet’s roster were not charged with any crime — the indictment describes them as deceived. They’ve said they had editorial control and no idea whose money it was, and on that narrow question I take them at their word. The mechanics are what matter, and the mechanics work either way.

That’s the design. You never have to buy anyone. You only have to fund them.

If you’re Russia, and you want a set of arguments circulating in the American bloodstream, this is the cheap way in. Find people who already lean your direction. Then make leaning that direction extremely good business. Pay for the studio, cover the booking fees, fill the comments with agreement, push the clips. The person on camera can be entirely sincere and the operation still works. Sincerity is the product.

It wasn’t one company, either. That same day, the Treasury Department sanctioned a batch of Russian entities and individuals tied to the wider influence apparatus, among them ANO Dialog, which is on paper a Russian nonprofit and in practice was connected to something called Doppelgänger — an operation that cloned real news sites down to the fonts in order to launder Kremlin copy into Western feeds. The Justice Department seized dozens of the counterfeit domains. This is a Russian industry. It has offices and org charts and performance metrics.

I used to think of these operations as rooted in persuasion. But now I realize it’s really closer to gardening. You can’t argue a plant into growing, but you can decide what gets water and fertilizer.

The Danger at Home

What ought to worry all of us heading into November is that the ground Russia was working is ground Americans cleared ourselves.

About one in five American adults now gets news regularly from what the Pew Research Center calls news influencers. Among adults under thirty it’s more than a third. The number I’d highligh is this one: of the influencers Pew studied, roughly three-quarters have no affiliation with any news organization at all. No editor. No standards desk. No lawyer down the hall whose entire job is to say: there’s no real proof, we can’t run that.

Meanwhile the institutions that employ editors, standards desks, and lawyers down the hall are coming apart. Northwestern’s Medill School has been keeping count, and the tally is grim: the country has been losing newspapers at a rate of about two and a half a week, and we’re down roughly 3,300 of them since 2005. More than two hundred counties have no local news source at all. Something like 55 million Americans live somewhere with little or none.

Trust fell through the floor over the same stretch. Gallup’s most recent polling puts trust in mass media at 28 percent, the first time it has ever come in under thirty. Among Republicans it’s 8 percent (!). You cannot build a civic information strategy on an 8.

Then add the past two years, in which we took apart most of the government’s ability to see any of this coming. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which tracked foreign propaganda, closed at the end of 2024, and the office meant to replace it was shut down the following spring. CISA — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the people who worked alongside state and county election officials — has lost about a third of its workforce and stepped back from election security work. The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force was quietly shuttered. Stanford’s Internet Observatory, which did more public-interest research on this than anyone in the country, lost its funding under legal and congressional pressure.

You may think some of that was justified. There are serious civil liberties objections to the government sitting anywhere near questions of speech. I don’t dismiss them and neither should you. But we should also be clear-eyed about what it costs. The traditional media and government watchtowers are unmanned.

So what do we actually do?

That’s the harder question, and it’s the one I’ll take up in part two later this Saturday — what the research says works, where that research is genuinely contested, and what we’re building at Bright America to make a positive impact.

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Thursday night, the President gave a primetime address about the upcoming midterm elections. He did exactly what we’ve come to expect: he told the country the system can’t be trusted, suggested the results might need to be questioned, and positioned himself as the sole protector of the vote’s integrity. Framing his arguments to justify his demands, he stated, “Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost”. He used these unsubstantiated claims to demand that Congress pass the SAVE America Act, a currently stalled voting bill that would be so burdensome that millions of legitimate voters would be denied ballots.

Of course, we’ve heard all of these arguments before. As someone who worked on the January 6th Select Committee and read the documents, the pattern is glaringly obvious.

What We Already Know

The committee’s final report documented a multi-part plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election. As the election lies are repeated more feverishly from the White House, it’s worth repeating some of January 6th Committee’s proven facts:

• Trump advisers drafted an executive order that would have directed the military and federal agencies to seize voting machines across the country.

• While it was never signed, it was written, reviewed, and seriously considered by people inside the White House.

• The Eastman memos laid out a strategy to pressure Vice President Pence into refusing to count certified electoral votes from seven states.

• Officials made direct calls to state election workers demanding they “find” votes.

• Alternate slates of fake electors were organized and submitted to Congress and the National Archives.

Over sixty courts rejected the legal challenges, including judges appointed by Republicans. The system held in 2020 because individual people chose to follow the law under enormous pressure. The Vice President refused to fold, and state officials held the line.

The Fact that Can’t be Spoken

Thursday’s speech didn’t happen in a vacuum. Just yesterday, the President’s newly appointed Director of National Intelligence could not confirm in a Senate hearing that Joe Biden won the 2020 election — on the record, under oath, in 2026.

But he is certainly not the first, as innumerable confirmation hearings have demonstrated that — in this Administration — repeating the fact that Trump legitimately lost the 2020 election is unforgivable.

What this means in practice is that the Administration, much of Congress, one of our major political parties, and their media cheerleaders must operate in an alternate reality, in which history has been rewritten. Stranger still is that many of these same leaders prominently condemned the President’s election lies following the January 6, 2021 attacks.

Who Actually Protects Your Vote

While the political drumbeat gets louder, and fear and anxiety rises as people wonder who is defending the rule of law and protecting our voter freedoms, there is hope! Our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center (CLC) is doing the serious, unglamorous work that matters.

• They helped pass the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, which successfully closed the specific loophole the Eastman memos tried to get Vice President Pence to exploit.

• They blocked the President’s executive order that sought to implement the SAVE Act by presidential decree. It would have required American citizens to produce a passport (which are expensive and half the country doesn’t have one) or a certified birth certificate that matches their current name (many people don’t have easy access to this documentation, and married women who have changed their names are out of luck anyway).

• They sued and won in multiple states that, following the President’s demands, tried to illegally change their maps this year, despite it being in violation of the state constitution.

• They monitor Hatch Act violations throughout this election cycle.

• They defend election workers, whose expertise and integrity serve as the last line of defense when everything else gets loud.

• Among hundreds of other bold, brave legal actions in defense of democracy.

I’ve watched them do this work, and it matters far more than anything a politician from either party can say in response to the President’s speech. With the President’s speech all but guaranteeing the 2026 election will face unprecedented challenges, we must rush as much support to the current and coming litigation as possible!

Fuel the Litigation Saving Our Elections

What I’m Asking You to Do

Call your representatives. Ask them directly:

1️⃣ Will you commit to certifying the results of the 2026 midterm elections once your state certifies them?

2️⃣ Will you oppose any effort to use federal agencies, including the military, to interfere with counting or certification?

3️⃣ Will you protect the independence of state and local election officials?

You can get their numbers here:

These questions have obvious answers if you believe in the Constitution. The committee documented exactly what happens when officials choose not to answer them honestly.

Get your representatives on the record, and support Campaign Legal Center’s work. And remember: the plan to seize election machines wasn’t a fringe idea floated by someone on the outside. It was a draft executive order written inside the White House.

We can only image what’s been drafted this year, lying in wait for the moment that may challenge our Constitution and Country like never before.

But the January 6th Committee unveiled the playbook — it doesn’t take that active of an imagination to know what they’ll try to do, which means we can be ready. The question now is whether enough people will demand our representatives honor their oaths, support the litigation defending our freedoms, and spread the word that the only way to “keep our republic” is free and fair elections.

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Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens nationwide Friday, and I can’t wait to see it (quite literrally, I bought tickets for Thursday night weeks ago!).

Like others who grew up captivated by these myths, I’m eager to see how Nolan handles the sweeping scale of the epic. But before sitting in the theater, I found myself listening to one of my very favorite scholars, the classicist Mary Beard, walk through what Homer’s poem is actually about. She made a point that hasn’t let go of me since:

On paper, the ending of the Odyssey is a classic story of restoration. Ithaca, in Odysseus’s twenty-year absence, has fallen into deep disorder. Suitors have occupied the palace, depleted its resources, and corrupted the social order. But by the end, the king returns, the interlopers are cleared out, and order is restored.

But Beard points us to a deeper, more realistic truth behind the myth:

“The reordering of Ithaca is a terribly bloody process.”

In a modern context, this isn’t about violence or physical conflict — it is about the sheer, exhausting friction of systemic change. The “suitors” of our democracy — entrenched interests, eroded norms, systemic decay and the minority who benefit from them — won’t just pack up and hand back the keys because we ask nicely. Reclaiming a home takes immense, friction-filled work.

And when the floors are finally scrubbed, the poem reveals that Odysseus doesn’t just sit on his throne forever; he has to keep moving.

Beard reads this not as a tragedy, but as Homer’s honest wisdom: the home you return to is never exactly the same, because you aren’t the same. The very process of rebuilding changes us, tempers our resolve, and prepares us to protect what we’ve built.

A 927-Page Reality Check

That question has been on my mind for a different reason. Four years of this administration is going to leave this country needing a homecoming of its own, and I don’t think anyone who’s watched things closely believes the country simply snaps back to where it was the moment this presidency ends. Too much has been unmade, among them the working assumptions that 1) the rule of law applies evenly, 2) America’s word means something to allies who’ve leaned on it for eighty years, and 3) a judiciary can be pressured but not outright owned.

Underneath all of it, something even more basic has shifted — the assumption that the presidency is not about self-enrichment.

Putting any of that back in order will not be a matter of flipping a switch. It could look more like Ithaca — slow, contested, and expensive, with real arguments about how far is too far.

Consider how far the distance has already stretched. A recent federal financial disclosure showed the President’s holdings grew by $2.2 billion in a single year, with more than half of it flowing from cryptocurrency ventures carrying his own name. The document itself runs a staggering 927 pages.

To put that in perspective:

• Barack Obama’s final disclosure ran eight pages.

• Joe Biden’s ran eleven.

• The current disclosure is nearly a thousand.

Historians say they don’t have much to measure it against. “There is no precedent to compare it with,” as Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley put it.

Nobody has accused the President of breaking the law here, and in a narrow sense, he hasn’t: the presidency is uniquely exempt from the conflict-of-interest rules that force any other senior official into a blind trust. But that is precisely the point made by a group of former White House ethics lawyers — appointees of both parties: the wall between the office and the fortune was never a law. It was a norm. It was upheld by nothing but mutual agreement and the fear of shame. You don’t notice an agreement like that until it’s gone.

The Modern Gerrymander Arms Race

The damage runs across multiple systems at once. Foreign alliances built on trust in American reliability don’t rebuild overnight. A judiciary reshaped over four years doesn’t rebalance in a single term. An anti-corruption enforcement apparatus that was sidelined requires sustained rebuilding, not a quick press conference.

Look at what happened when a divided Supreme Court gutted a core piece of the Voting Rights Act. Within hours, legislatures in Florida and Louisiana were redrawing maps to take advantage of the opening — the acceleration of what election lawyers had already called a nationwide gerrymandering arms race.

Restoring the system means writing these optional norms into hard law. That requires a Congress and a President with the energy and willingness to take on fights that will feel politically costly, and to face a level of backlash we haven’t seen in the modern reform era.

Polarization has already made accountability harder; that is one of the things these past four years have demonstrated most clearly. Reform will require facing sacred cows directly: the campaign finance structures that entrench incumbents, the gerrymandering that makes legislators unaccountable, and the ethics law gaps that made all of this possible in the first place. Half-measures won’t hold.

The Quiet Work of the Loom

Fortunately, the unglamorous work is already quietly underway. Our brilliant strategic litigation partner, Campaign Legal Center, is successfully fighting those gerrymandered maps in state courts right now — in places like Utah, Missouri, and Florida — while pushing for the slower, structural fix: independent commissions that take the pen out of whichever party currently holds it.

None of this makes the evening news. But it’s exactly the kind of institution-by-institution, statute-by-statute work that turned Watergate into the Federal Election Commission and the campaign finance rules (eroded as they may be) we still use today. A country can legislate its way back into an ethical house. It just requires good people doing the right thing — easier said than done, but intuitively possible.

This is where the Odyssey offers its best, most overlooked lesson:

Odysseus isn’t the only one doing the work of coming home. While he is gone for twenty years, his son Telemachus — played by Tom Holland in Nolan’s version — grows from a boy nobody takes seriously into a man capable of standing beside his father when it finally matters. Meanwhile, his wife Penelope spends years outlasting suitors who assume she’ll eventually hand over the house, famously weaving a burial shroud by day and quietly undoing it by night, buying the precious time the household needs to survive.

Neither of them gets the grand statue or top billing — but neither of them wastes the years they’re given, either.

That is closer to what rebuilding actually looks like. It isn’t one dramatic, cinematic homecoming. It is years of steady resistance by people who refuse to give the house away before there is anyone home to defend it. Somewhere in small rooms on Capitol Hill right now and in judge’s chambers across the country, mostly out of view, that is exactly what’s happening.

The House We Build Next

This is the deeper truth of the Odyssey. Beard’s observation — that the home you restore is never quite the home you remember — doesn’t have to be a warning of failure. It can be a promise of progress.

We cannot simply roll back the clock. We can neither pretend the last two years didn’t happen, nor that we should try returning to a flawed status quo. Democracy was never meant to be preserved in amber — it is a living, breathing thing that must be constantly fortified, repaired, and made more resilient.

Our goal shouldn’t be to merely crawl back into the old house. Our goal must be to build a stronger one.

The hope doesn’t lie in a passive wish that everything will just snap back into place. It lies in the deliberate, active preparation of people who are ready to do the heavy lifting:

• Drafting the blueprints now. Writing the legal frameworks and closing the ethics loopholes while we have the quiet hours to get the details right.

• Gathering the crew. Building the broad, resilient coalitions that will be ready to act the moment the window of opportunity opens.

• Cultivating the will. Reminding ourselves that the unglamorous, day-to-day defense of our institutions is the most powerful way to shape the future.

This is the work of our movement, and we can use your help:

Help Us Build

Odysseus didn’t just stumble onto the beach and hope for a miracle. He took a breath, surveyed the damage, and trusted the people standing beside him. He knew that taking back his home would require everything he had — and he prepared accordingly.

The work ahead is massive, but we are not starting from scratch. The plans are being drawn. The alliances are forming. The looms are moving in the quiet hours.

We know exactly what we are walking into. And we are ready to build.

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A few nights ago, from a damp field in rural Virginia about an hour outside Washington, I watched my seven-year-old daughter look at the sky the way you only get to a few times in a lifetime. Both her hands were wrapped around mine, an expression of awe on her face, absolutely certain the fireworks were performing just for her. A sudden summer storm had rolled through that evening, cooling the air and sweeping away the July haze. It left behind the kind of clear, open sky anyone could appreciate.

It was America’s 250th birthday. And for one night, in that quiet field, it actually felt like it.

The Party in Washington

Two years ago, I was appointed executive director of what was then still called — with typical bureaucratic grace — the Semiquincentennial Commission (aka America 250). I came to the role naively ambitious. I genuinely believed the 250th could be a rare, unifying moment when the country finally showed up for itself — a year when Americans of all stripes could look past the noise, return to the plain language of the Declaration, and agree that the ideas underneath it were still worth the trouble.

I knew going in how fiercely contested that narrative already was. I remember The New York Times dedicating an episode of The Daily to that exact tension, tracing how our founding myth has been claimed, weaponized, and reclaimed by the left and the right — from Frederick Douglass’s generation to our own. But I still believed we could find our way to a shared, honest version of our story — one that acknowledged our deepest failures while remaining aimed at the country we still have time to become.

I expected whoever held the White House this year to put their own stamp on the day; every president does. What I did not expect was that a decade of painstaking, nonpartisan planning would be shoved aside to make room for a one-man show. And I certainly didn’t expect a modern crusade against communism to become the centerpiece of our nation’s 250th anniversary. From a stage at Mount Rushmore on the eve of the Fourth, the rhetoric warned of a “communist menace” painted as more dangerous than the existential wars of the last century. It felt small. It felt exhausted. It felt beneath us, and all who came before.

The 250th Somewhere Else

But the real anniversary happened somewhere else, entirely away from the teleprompters.

• In New York Harbor, forty-eight tall ships from twenty nations cut through the water past the Statue of Liberty for Sail4th 250 — reviving a grand tradition President Kennedy first championed, which our country now brings back once a generation.

• In Philadelphia, even after the official parade was called off, “America’s Time Capsule” was quietly lowered into the ground on Independence Mall. It is a nine-hundred-pound, watertight cylinder holding a Pennsylvania governor’s letter, a Phillies lineup card, and handwritten notes from schoolchildren across the country, sealed until the year 2276.

Someone has been keeping this national chain letter running for a century and a half. We buried a capsule for 2076 during the Bicentennial, and another during the Centennial in 1876, which was dug up by Gerald Ford exactly fifty years ago. It is a quiet, continuous act of faith in our own future.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a massive benefit concert raised millions for charity rather than a politician, selling tickets for exactly $17.76. And because the 250th collided with the World Cup this summer, the timing became an unexpected gift. All month, international visitors have been discovering local diners, ranch dressing, gas-station slushies, and the particular American genius of the free refill, while Americans have realized the rest of the world showed up just wanting to celebrate with us.

The Daily ran another episode recently, noting that the tournament’s best story was happening entirely off the pitch, as a wave of global visitors and their hosts really looked at one another for the first time in years. Boston offered the purest glimpse of this: Scottish soccer fans took over the city’s historic pubs, marched en masse to Fenway Park, and left behind so much genuine goodwill that Boston and Glasgow are now, officially, sister cities.

The Mirror of 1976

None of this cultural resilience is entirely new. Fifty years ago, the country limped into its Bicentennial deeply bruised. We had just watched a president resign in disgrace to avoid impeachment, pulled our last helicopters out of a generation-long war in Vietnam, and watched inflation eat away at every paycheck in the wake of crippling energy shocks.

Historians look at the parallels between 1976 and 2026 and find them eerie. A different fight over executive power stands in for Watergate; a different set of messy overseas commitments stands in for Vietnam. Even the commercialization was a headache back then — corporate sponsors piled onto the Bicentennial so aggressively that critics mocked it as the “buy-centennial.”

And yet, out of that cynical mess, the country built things that actually lasted. The National Air and Space Museum opened its doors that same July. New museums dedicated to Black and Native American history were sparked by the anniversary and opened shortly after. Thousands of ordinary towns used the milestone as an excuse to restore a crumbling local courthouse or schoolhouse. A messy national mood and a real civic renewal are not mutually exclusive. We have done this before.

The political incentives of our current two-party system simply do not reward renewal. They reward holding your ground, screaming louder, and solving nothing.

Until that structural reality changes, we will continue to get louder anniversaries and smaller results. The fix isn’t complicated to describe, even if it is agonizingly hard to execute: root out the systemic corruption that is hiding in plain sight, take the dark money out of the decisions that reward political gridlock, and close the gap between what America promises on paper and what it delivers in practice. Do that, and institutional trust will return on its own.

But until that day arrives, two things cannot be treated as optional:

1) Free and fair elections, and

2) A culture willing to abide by their outcomes.

These are are the absolute floor upon which everything else stands. There is no better version of America without it.

Help Prevent Election Sabotage!

A Promise in the Ground

My daughter doesn’t know anything about partisan incentives, executive overreach, or bureaucratic misfires yet. Saturday night, she just saw the sky fill with golden light and understood, instinctively and correctly, that it was beautiful, and that it was for her.

There is a sealed cylinder resting under the stone of Independence Mall right now that will not see the light of day until 2276. It is a promise, buried in the dark, that Americans will still be here to dig it up. And as cool as the idea may be that people 10 generations from now may look back on our lives with interest or amusement - who cares?

Instead of burying something for the future, let’s build a more perfect union for them instead — a country worthy of the staggering wager made 250 years ago, and all that’s been spent to secure it since.

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In the last week of its term, the U.S. Supreme Court issued several decisions of critical importance to voters and our elections. Campaign Legal Center filed legal briefs in connection with each case, urging the justices to uphold the rule of law, the Constitution’s separation of powers, and a more inclusive, transparent and accountable democracy.

The results, in the end, are decidedly mixed. The Court deserves little praise for the meager number of pro-democracy rulings it issued; those cases involved questions that were cut and dry, according to the vast majority of legal experts, and yet still produced dissents. On the other side of the ledger, the Roberts Court majority continued down a well-trodden path of rejecting long-established precedents with rulings that further tip the scales in favor of powerful special interests at the expense of the public interest.

The legal rationale for these rulings will be the subject of ongoing analysis and debate in the coming days and for years to come. What may matter most in a practical sense is how these decisions will impact Americans’ ability to cast a ballot and make their voices heard as part of the democratic process.

Watson v. Republican National Committee

In our democracy, every voter who casts a ballot according to the rules in their state must have their vote counted. This includes ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and received by the absentee ballot deadline established by a given state.

In a 5-4 ruling, the Court preserved the authority of states to set these deadlines themselves. Had this decision gone the other way, laws in 30 states allowing ballots in federal elections to be received after Election Day could have been invalidated, causing confusion and chaos just months before the midterm elections.

The majority opinion cites a portion of the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA) of 2022 in explaining its reasoning. Campaign Legal Center played an integral role in the bipartisan passage of the ECRA, which includes crucial safeguards to ensure the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next. The law explicitly acknowledges states’ authority to set ballot deadlines and does not impose national rules that supersede those deadlines — which CLC highlighted in an amicus brief we filed in this case alongside our partners at Protect Democracy.

Trump v. Slaughter

The issue at the heart of this case was the president’s power over federal agencies that are designed and empowered by Congress to operate independently.

The Court’s 6-3 ruling says that laws restricting the president’s ability to fire the heads of regulatory agencies are contrary to the founder’s intent that the president have full control over the functioning of the executive branch (and holding that the functions of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and similar agencies are part of that branch). This opens the door for this president, and those who follow, to remove top regulators for virtually any reason, including failure to adhere to a particular political or policy agenda.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, reading her dissent from the bench, criticized the majority for extending a “maximalist view of presidential power,” reportedly looking often at Chief Justice John Roberts as she did so.

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush appointed me to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), an agency designed to operate independently from the White House. As a Republican commissioner, I refused to attend reelection strategy briefings at the White House on the basis that the FEC’s role was nonpartisan. The idea that President Bush, or any other president, would try to interfere with the agency’s work was unthinkable.

Now, with the threat of arbitrary removal hanging over the heads of independent agency commissioners, we enter a world of uncertainty, where political considerations could override the public interest and well-reasoned expertise on a wide range of impactful regulatory decisions.

Remarkably, on the same day as Slaughter, the Court issued a ruling in Cook v. Trump that exempts members of one independent agency — the Federal Reserve Board — from this dangerous expansion of executive power. Giving the president the ability to randomly fire Fed governors, according to Chief Justice John Roberts, would be “an interpretive leap out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference.”

Nowhere does Roberts explain why Congress can constitutionally establish an independent federal banking agency but not an independent FTC and other similar independent agencies. It is not hard to see the flaw in these divergent rulings — the Court refuses to defer to the policy decisions made by Congress and gives itself the right to decide which agencies deserve protection and independence.

Campaign Legal Center’s analysis of the Slaughter and Cook rulings is ongoing, focusing on what this could mean for agencies that play a role in our electoral process.

NRSC v. FEC

The Supreme Court has infamously empowered wealthy special interests to have outsized influence on our elections, a dynamic that kicked into overdrive following the Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United.

Until today, however, the Court had upheld limits on election spending by political parties in coordination with a given candidate. By extension, this campaign finance law restricted the degree to which wealthy special interests could use political parties as a conduit to funnel even larger contributions to candidates for office and our elections.

With a 6-3 opinion, the Court has wiped away this sensible guardrail, further expanding an umbrella of First Amendment protection for election spending at the expense of the public’s vital interest in limiting political corruption.

There is good reason to be alarmed about the nullification of these coordinated spending limits. Political parties are allowed to accept much larger donations than individual candidates. When the parties coordinate their spending with the campaigns of particular candidates, it’s no different than giving the campaigns the money directly.

Indeed, as Justice Elena Kagan noted in her dissent, a typical coordinated spending situation involves a candidate’s campaign simply sending the party invoices for spending that the campaign has completely controlled, leaving the party less a “collaborative speaker” and more a “simple piggy bank” for the candidate.

The Supreme Court’s decision thus creates a new campaign finance loophole that turns political parties into yet another vehicle through which wealthy donors can direct truckloads of cash directly to benefit their preferred candidate’s campaign.

Trump v. Barbara

In this case, the Court, by a narrow margin, struck down a Trump executive order issued on the first day of his second term that would have completely upended the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to nearly everyone born in the United States.

As explained in the friend-of-the-court brief Campaign Legal Center submitted, the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship guarantee is the key that unlocks equal membership and participation in our democracy. A ruling upholding the executive order would have rendered millions of Americans effectively stateless, depriving them of the rights and privileges that come with citizenship, including the right to vote in federal elections starting at the age of 18.

While the Court majority reaffirmed long-standing precedent and the plain text of the Constitution that birthright citizenship is the law of the land, four justices took the deeply troubling position that nothing in the U.S. Constitution prevents attempts like the one undertaken by the president to strip U.S.-born children of their citizenship and lock them out of the franchise.

An alarming 5-4 vote on the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment is yet another sign that we must remain vigilant against further attacks on fundamental principles of democratic equality.

Taking stock of the latest term

So ends one of the most consequential U.S. Supreme Court terms for our democracy. On the whole, the Court’s rulings in this area of the law have hindered Americans’ ability to express their political preferences through the electoral process. We must not forget that prior to this last round of decisions, the Court dealt a mortal blow to the Voting Rights Act and sanctioned the pursuit of partisan political goals as a justification for gerrymandering.

While the Court ultimately landed on the right side of the law and the Constitution in some of these final cases, to have done otherwise — on birthright citizenship and vote-by-mail in particular — would have been indefensible. Such beyond-the-pale decisions would have made the Court even more vulnerable than it already is to accusations of political and ideological bias.

Regardless of how the Court rules on future cases, Campaign Legal Center will remain committed to our core mission of advancing democracy through law. When this Court throws up roadblocks to the pro-democracy agenda, we will pursue every legal and policy avenue available to ensure Americans can exercise their fundamental right to fully participate in the democratic process.

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Looking for more in-depth insights on issues critical to our democracy? Consider subscribing to the “From the Desk of Trevor Potter” newsletter, written by Campaign Legal Center’s founder and president, Trevor Potter. Get expert analysis and learn more about Campaign Legal Center’s efforts to protect and strengthen democracy for all Americans by subscribing via email or on LinkedIn.

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Voters should choose their politicians, not the other way around. Sounds simple enough — like an idea we could ALL get behind. Yet today, we are watching our political parties drive us down a road to ruin, racing to see who can rig the system the fastest.

Driven by a highly unusual mid-decade redistricting frenzy triggered in 2025 and 2026 , state legislatures across the country are frantically redrawing congressional maps to consolidate their own power. We cannot continue down this dark path. If we want a brighter future for America, we must fundamentally change how we draw our lines.

The Threat to Our Democracy

Gerrymandering — the manipulation of voting district boundaries for political or racial advantage — is a poison in the bloodstream of our democracy. Using sophisticated software, politicians employ two main tactics: “cracking” (dividing a group’s supporters across multiple districts to dilute their power) and “packing” (concentrating them heavily into a few districts so they win fewer seats overall).

The results are — to put it lightly — disappointing. Gerrymandering destroys competitive elections, making politicians less responsive to their constituents and more beholden to extreme primary bases. Because of how our maps are drawn, an estimated 60 million Americans (roughly one in four voters) are structurally disenfranchised, forced to cast ineffectual ballots or associate with parties they don’t endorse just to have a say.

The crisis deepened in April 2026 when the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais significantly narrowed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. This disastrous decision made it easier for states to engage in racial vote dilution, allowing map-drawers to defend discriminatory maps simply by claiming they were engaging in partisan gerrymandering.

The First Line of Defense

We are not without defenders. The Campaign Legal Center (CLC) is standing on the front lines, fighting vigorously to ensure every voice is heard and every vote counts equally.

Help Us Champion Fair Maps

Because the Supreme Court ruled in the 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause case that federal courts cannot settle partisan gerrymandering disputes, CLC has rolled up its sleeves and taken the fight directly to the states. Here is how they are leading the charge:

• Aggressive State Litigation: CLC is actively suing in state courts to strike down manipulated maps, leveraging state constitutions that expressly forbid partisan gerrymandering, such as in Florida.

• A Federal Ban: They are fiercely advocating for Congress to pass national legislation that prohibits partisan gerrymandering nationwide, establishes neutral map-drawing criteria, and provides a clear path to resolve disputes.

• Independent Redistricting Commissions (IRCs): CLC’s gold standard for state reform is the creation of IRCs — voter-centric bodies completely separate from the state legislature.

• Ironclad Ethics: To ensure these commissions are truly fair, CLC insists on strict ethical rules. They recommend prohibiting recently elected officials, political party bosses, and lobbyists from serving. They also demand total transparency, requiring public hearings and allowing voters to submit their own maps.

Solutions All Parties Can Embrace

If we want to fix a broken system without relying on the goodwill of the politicians who broke it, we need to look at structural upgrades. Here are a few you should know about:

• Proportional Representation: Single-member, winner-take-all districts are a massive part of the problem. If a district splits 51% to 49%, almost half the voters get zero representation. Transitioning to multi-winner districts would allocate seats proportionally. If a minority population makes up 25 percent of a broader district that elects four winners, they can still elect one of the candidates (let us know in the comments if you’d like to hear more about this reform).

• The Fair Representation Act: We can rally behind federal legislation like the Fair Representation Act, which pairs multi-member districts with Ranked Choice Voting to ensure our elected bodies actually reflect the voters.

• All-Candidate Primaries: To stop structural disenfranchisement, states can adopt all-candidate primaries. By putting all candidates on a single primary ballot regardless of party, we eliminate compelled partisan association and give every single voter universal access to a meaningful choice.

We don’t have to accept a system that dilutes our power and rewards extremism. Together, we can build a brighter, fairer America where our voices are heard, our votes are counted, and our politicians actually have to earn their seats.

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There is a quiet, insidious transition taking place in American life — one that we cannot allow to take hold. It is the shifting of our foundational bedrock from the rule of law — where rules are predictable, public, and applied equally (imperfect as it may be) — to the rule of ONE man, where survival requires anticipating the whims, moods, and personal vendettas of the executive branch.

When a republic shifts from institutional governance to personalized rule, the primary currency becomes fealty, and the primary deterrent becomes fear. Two seemingly unrelated stories from the past week — one involving a stalwart conservative legal nonprofit, the other a cutting-edge artificial intelligence startup — reveal exactly how this chilling effect operates in practice.

Winning in Court, Losing in Business

Consider the Liberty Justice Center (LJC), a nonprofit with a sterling conservative pedigree known for fighting public-sector unions and challenging university DEI policies. Certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, but the group’s commitment to its principles was on fully display when it won the biggest victory in its 15-year history: a Supreme Court ruling that struck down President Trump’s global tariffs, ruling against unbridled presidential power and opening the door for businesses to reclaim billions in unconstitutionally collected funds.

By all traditional metrics of American civic life, this was a triumph for the constitutional separation of powers. But in the current political climate, it was treated as a corporate liability.

• The LJC lost over 30% of its donor base simply for taking the case, as conservative benefactors fled the controversy of challenging the administration.

• Major corporations like Costco, which stood to benefit immensely from the multi-billion-dollar tariff refunds, explicitly refused to donate to or support the litigation.

Instead of fighting for their constitutional rights, major companies have largely taken a conciliatory path: rolling back “controversial” initiatives, avoiding legal challenges, and even donating to pet projects like the new White House ballroom. When big business decides that building a ballroom for the President is a safer bet than defending the law in court, the rule of law is on the ropes as some seek to replace it with a system of transactional appeasement.

“Bullying Based on Bad Vibes”

If the corporate world is being coerced into silence through financial anxiety, the tech sector is learning what happens when you dare to push back.

Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup, recently found itself in the administration’s crosshairs. The company had previously clashed with the Pentagon over a $200 million defense contract, leading Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to retaliate by labeling the domestic firm a “supply chain risk” — a devastating national security designation never before used against an American company. Anthropic responded by doing what citizens in a free republic are supposed to do: they sued the government.

The administration’s retaliation was swift and arbitrary. Recently, executives at Anthropic received a sudden White House directive: they had less than 90 minutes to pull their latest AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, off the market.

“Are we being bullied based on bad vibes?” one Anthropic employee asked in an internal chat. “At what point does this just feel like they don’t want us to exist?”

The justification for the shutdown was entirely inconsistent. The White House cited vague national security flaws based on a single, preliminary paper from Amazon — yet cybersecurity experts note that rival models from companies like OpenAI possess the exact same capabilities but face no such restrictions. Over 150 top cybersecurity experts have signed an open letter calling the administration’s abrupt restrictions unfair, pointing out that Anthropic’s safety guardrails were actually incredibly robust.

When the state can give a successful American company a 90-minute ultimatum to destroy its product line without offering concrete evidence, clear guidelines, or due process, it is no longer exercising governance. It is exercising raw, personalized power.

A Republic of Apprehension

When you lay these two cases side-by-side, a deeply disturbing architecture of modern authoritarianism emerges. You do not need to throw political dissidents into prison to break a republic; you merely need to make the cost of principle too high to bear.

When law firms are blacklisted for taking on government cases, when nonprofits are defunded for winning in the Supreme Court, and when tech companies are knee-capped by 90-minute administrative ultimatums after suing the Pentagon, the message sent to the country is loud and clear: The law will not protect you from the President.

This is how the rule of law erodes. It dies when regular citizens, massive corporations, and brilliant innovators look at a constitutional violation and decide it is safer to stay quiet, bow their heads, and hope they aren’t noticed.

If we want a Bright America, we must remember that the Constitution was designed explicitly to protect us from the whims of a single ruler. If we allow the administration to turn the legal and regulatory systems into a personal weapon of retribution, we lose the very thing that made our economy and our nation great in the first place. The rule of law must belong to all of us — or eventually, it will belong to no one.

BY OLIVIA TROYE

I own two soccer jerseys.

A green one. A blue one.

Some people find that complicated. I don’t, because both of them are stitched together with something that has nothing to do with borders or politics. They’re made of memory. Of family. Of what it means to belong somewhere.

Growing up, soccer was the language my mom’s side spoke when they wanted to feel whole. My uncles, my cousins, crammed around whatever TV had the best signal, switching between Spanish and English depending on the moment, depending on the emotion. Nobody code-switched for soccer. You just felt it.

El Tri was the team. Still is, for that part of me.

I don’t think people fully understand what it means to cheer for Mexico when you’re American. It’s not a political statement. It’s not confused loyalty. It’s memory. And, it’s the smell of my mamagrande’s (grandma’s) kitchen during a World Cup match. It’s my uncle losing his mind over a goal like it personally vindicated every hard year he’d ever had. It’s learning what it means to want something badly, to invest yourself completely in something that might break your heart, and to do it anyway, every four years, with the people you love.

That’s not divided loyalty. That’s inheritance.

And then there’s the USMNT (U.S. Men’s National Team), the team I watch as an American, full stop. I root for this program with real investment. Frustrated by the missteps, genuinely excited about where this generation is headed. The talent is real. The potential is there. And with a World Cup coming to this very soil, the pressure and the opportunity are both enormous.

And then I went to Miami.

I recently sat across from business owners, community leaders, hospitality workers, people who have built something in their cities, who have poured themselves into their neighborhoods, who serve people every single day. And what I heard wasn’t just excitement about the economic windfall coming this year from being a World Cup host city — it was something more complicated than that.

It was a question, really.

Will we be ready? Will everyone feel welcome here?

Five million visitors. Eleven host cities. A global audience of five billion. The 2026 FIFA World Cup isn’t just the largest sporting event in the history of North America, it’s a referendum on who we are as a country right now. On whether we can look the world in the eye and mean it when we say “welcome.”

That question hit me differently than it might have hit someone else in the room.

Because I know what it feels like to show up somewhere and wonder if you belong. I’ve lived in the space between identities my whole life, professionally, personally, politically. I’ve been in rooms where people looked at me and made assumptions. I’ve also been in rooms where someone made an extra effort, asked a genuine question, made space, and the difference between those two experiences is everything.

That’s what Welcome Standard is about.

It’s a voluntary pledge for hospitality businesses — restaurants, hotels, bars, retailers — in World Cup host cities. A commitment to a warm welcome, a safe environment, inclusive service, and community pride. It’s not a mandate from the government. It’s not a corporate PR campaign. It’s a coalition of owners and operators saying: when the world walks through our door, we want them to feel how warmly welcomed they are.

The business case is real. Hotels in host cities are forecasting revenue lifts of up to 25% during the tournament, and the multiplier effects for restaurants and retail are citywide. But when I talked to the people in Miami who are part of this, they weren’t leading with the revenue numbers. They were leading with something else. They were talking about their staff — many of whom are immigrants, many of whom speak multiple languages, many of whom are the communities that soccer fans from around the world will be looking for when they land in an American city and wonder if there’s a place here for them given the political climate here in the United States. They were talking about what it means to their neighborhood to be seen as a host city, not just a backdrop, but a genuine part of the story. They were talking about legacy.

That word keeps coming up when I think about 2026. Legacy.

What does it mean to host the world? What story do we tell about ourselves when 5 million people land on our shores, walk into our restaurants, take a cab through our cities, and watch matches in our stadiums? What do they bring home with them — not just memories of goals and upsets and trophies, but a feeling about us? About America?

I grew up watching soccer teach me that you can hold more than one home in your chest. That love isn’t zero-sum. That the moment a goal goes in, the eruption in the room is the same whether the chant is in Spanish or English, because joy doesn’t need a translator. This tournament has a chance to say something true about who we are. Not a sanitized, press-release version of America. The real one. Complicated, multilingual, loud, proud, argumentative, generous, and beautifully imperfect.

But that only happens if we’re intentional about it. If the businesses in host cities actually prepare, and hospitality workers feel supported and trained and seen. Will the communities that make these cities what they are get to be part of the celebration, not just the backdrop for someone else’s?

Welcome Standard is one piece of that. A practical, local, voluntary framework that gives businesses a way to show up right. To put the badge in the window and mean it. When the world arrives, and it is coming, whether we’re ready or not, it will judge us one interaction at a time. The greeter at the hotel desk. The server at the table. The shopkeeper on the corner.

My cousins and uncles taught me something about what a real welcome feels like, how it lands, and what it means to someone who traveled a long way and doesn’t know if they belong.

Let’s give the world that feeling.

To everyone already part of the Welcome Standard coalition: the restaurant owners, hotel operators, small business leaders, and community organizers who raised their hand and said “yes” — thank you! Genuinely. What you’re doing matters. The world will feel it, even if they never know your name.

And if you’re a business in a host city and you’re not yet part of this, there’s still time. Sign the pledge. Train your team. Put the badge in your window. Show the world what your city is made of. Learn more and sign up at welcomestandard.org.

This Thursday, June 11th, at 3pm ET, the kickoff match to the World Cup begins. I’ll be hosting a watch party as Mexico and South Africa faceoff, and everyone is invited. Come join me HERE. Fair warning: I will scream, I will cheer, and yes, I will probably cry. Ninety minutes of pure rollercoaster, every single time. I can’t help it. I never could. Oh, and I invited the mariachis. If I miss you in my hometown in Virginia, I will also be in Los Angeles next week. Come join me HERE. ⚽🇺🇸🇨🇦🇲🇽

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Thanks to our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center (CLC), a federal judge in Maine just blocked a highly coordinated, politically motivated attempt by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to build a case for mass voter purges . On May 21, 2026, the court dismissed a DOJ lawsuit against Maine's Secretary of State, Shenna Bellows, which demanded access to the state's entire digital voter database — including private driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security digits . While on the surface this might look like a standard, routine data request, it was actually a sweeping overreach designed to lean into baseless "stolen election" conspiracy theories, harass state election officials, and look for any excuse to kick valid voters off the rolls . Fortunately, the court saw right through it.

The Blueprint for a Partisan Voter Purge

Why is the federal government suddenly demanding the bulk voter files of thirty different states? The answer came to light when a recent executive order directed federal agencies to compile a massive “State Citizenship List”.

The underlying motivation is clear: the administration wants to use bulk voter data as a pretext to launch sweeping voter roll purges and generate talking points to baselessly claim widespread election fraud. By forcing states to hand over these lists, the DOJ is attempting to build a centralized, federal database to “double-check” — and ultimately destabilize — how states (in which the Constitution vests election responsibility) manage their own voter lists.

This is a direct attack on state control and constitutional order. State and municipal election officials take a solemn oath to administer elections fairly, securely, and with an immense number of built-in checks and balances. Instead of being allowed to do their jobs, these public servants are being harassed and sued by a federal agency that is supposed to remain completely independent of political agendas.

The Judge Exposed the “Fishing Expedition”

In his ruling, Chief U.S. District Judge Lance E. Walker did not hold back. He completely dismantled the DOJ’s arguments and pointed out exactly how backward their strategy was:

• No legal authority: The DOJ tried to use a 60-year-old civil rights law to demand the data, but the court ruled that federal law does not give federal agencies a blank check to seize digital databases built internally by state workers.

• States run the show: Federal laws like the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) explicitly leave election management and list maintenance to individual states, not the federal government.

• A backward lawsuit: Judge Walker noted that the DOJ didn’t actually allege that Maine committed any election violations. Instead, they filed a lawsuit in search of a violation, hoping to use federal court power to conduct a giant “fishing expedition” through Maine’s data.

Maine is not the only state holding the line. This ruling marks the seventh time a federal court has rejected these DOJ data-grabs, and an eighth court in Wisconsin threw out a similar lawsuit immediately after.

Standing Up to the Machine

When a weaponized federal agency targets a state, they count on their endless, taxpayer-funded budget to bully local officials into compliance. They expect states to fold because fighting the federal government in court is incredibly expensive.

Maine stood its ground because our strategic litigation partner CLC stepped up to intervene and defend the state’s authority. CLC provides the elite legal firepower needed to stop these politically motivated attacks right in their tracks.

Help Our Movement Hold the Line

When you look at what is truly at stake, the choice becomes clear. We can either watch independent local election systems get dismantled by conspiracy-driven federal overreach, or we can make sure the groups fighting back have the resources they need to win. Stopping a partisan takeover of American elections requires more than just hoping for good court rulings — it requires a well-resourced, highly professional legal shield.

By supporting this work, you directly fuel the critical lawsuits on the front lines of these battles. If you believe our elections should be run by independent local officials rather than a weaponized federal agency, please consider making a donation today to keep this defensive line strong.

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As Memorial Day closes and summer begins, something worth noticing happens across America. Neighbors meet over backyard fences. Churches and civic groups host summer camps. Flags appear in storefronts, on porches, in parades through small towns. None of this makes the news. It doesn't trend. But it matters more than most of what does.

This summer is different in scale for two unusual reasons:

• America turns 250 years old, and

• The World Cup will be hosted by 11 cities across our country.

Whether you view these as celebrations or spectacles, embedded within them is an invitation to remember something we have been quietly losing as a society for decades, and the opportunity to choose whether we rebuild it. And that something is fraternity.

The Third Leg

America’s political arguments, court battles, and even our national identity are dominated by the words (and let’s hope the ideals) of “liberty” and “equality.” But the French Revolution's third ideal, fraternité, rarely gets the same treatment. In liberal political philosophy, it has largely been reduced to sentiment: nice, but soft. Optional.

Aristotle wouldn’t agree. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he described philia as a distinct and essential bond among citizens. Not the deep friendship of close companions, and not the thin transactional relationship of strangers who share a legal system. He wrote of something in between: a relationship of reciprocal goodwill among people who share a common life, a common place, a common fate. He called it politike philia, political friendship, and he was clear that justice alone could not substitute for it. A city held together only by law is fragile. A city bound by civic friendship is resilient.

Tocqueville saw this clearly when he came to America in the 1830s. Yes, he admired the formal machinery of democracy, but he was truly astonished by the informal social machinery running beneath it. Americans joined things. They formed associations for every conceivable purpose: civic, religious, commercial, charitable, and beyond. This habit of association, Tocqueville argued, was the real foundation of American democracy. It kept individualism from collapsing into isolation.

He also issued a warning. Unbridled individualism could produce what he called "soft despotism," which is a society of atomized individuals, each isolated and equal in their smallness, presided over by a distant and paternalistic state. The citizens of such a society would not be oppressed in any dramatic sense. They would simply shrink. They would lose the habit of acting together, and with it, the capacity to govern themselves.

That warning reads as prophecy now.

What We’ve Lost

The data is startling, but won’t surprise you: Across every domain of American civic life,
from fraternal organizations to religious congregations to informal socializing, participation has been declining since roughly the 1960s. The trend has not reversed.

What has collapsed most severely is what sociologist Marc Dunkelman called the middle ring: the neighbors, colleagues, and fellow parishioners we knew well enough to argue with and still show up for. And while we have kept our inner circles of close friends and family, and expanded vast outer networks online, we’ve largely allowed the middle, where Aristotle's
civic friendship actually lives, to erode. Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, whose 2023 advisory declared loneliness a public health epidemic, argued that social disconnection makes us more susceptible to manipulation and more vulnerable to those who offer the warmth of belonging in exchange for the surrender of judgment.

Hannah Arendt, the influential German-born Jewish political philosopher and historian who fled Nazi Germany as a refugee, put it into even starker terms. Totalitarianism, she argued, is only possible in atomized societies, places where intermediate associations have been destroyed and citizens have fully retreated into private life. The private person, withdrawn from public life, is not a free person. She is simply an unorganized one. When public life contracts, the space that remains does not stay empty.

The Summer Ahead

This is the context in which I am approaching the summer of 2026.

We began with the conviction that rule of law alone will not save us from democratic decay. Courts and constitutions matter. The litigation work our strategic partner Campaign Legal Center does across the country to preserve our freedoms matters enormously. But legal infrastructure, at its most effective, requires civic infrastructure beneath it. An educated, engaged, connected citizenry cannot replace the rule of law, and vice versa. Ideally, in a healthy society, they’re complementary.

The ancient Greeks understood this. The original Olympic Games were civic events, moments when city-states set aside their conflicts, traveled together, competed together, and returned home with a refreshed sense of shared identity. The World Cup is one of the rare events large enough to create genuine shared experience across communities that rarely intersect. This summer, in the host cities, we have been working with civic partners to launch the Welcome Standard, which is a pledge by businesses to welcome ALL visitors, regardless of race, religion, or country of origin.

A business that takes the pledge makes a public declaration about who it is. It joins a community of businesses that have made the same declaration. It builds the kind of horizontal bond among local institutions that Tocqueville called the genius of American association. Good hospitality is good business. It is also an act of civic friendship, an extension of goodwill to strangers, and a recognition that visitors deserve to be treated as guests.

An Invitation

This summer is larger than any one event or program.

The 250th anniversary of American independence is a moment for honesty about what the experiment requires of us, not just the formal requirements of citizenship, but the relational ones. The Constitution can guarantee rights. It cannot guarantee the relationships that make
rights meaningful in practice.

Those relationships are built at a neighborhood barbecue. At a school play. At a church summer camp. At a block party where you meet the person three houses down who you have passed a hundred times without speaking. These are not small things. They are, as Aristotle insisted and Tocqueville confirmed and Putnam documented and Arendt understood, the bedrock of self-government.

Pope Leo XIV, in his recent reflections on artificial intelligence and human society, raised a concern that echoes across centuries of political philosophy. How does technology, which so often deepens our isolation and impacts our happiness, affect our capacity for the kind of shared life that free societies require?

The answer is not to reject modernity. It is to be deliberate about what we build alongside it.

This summer, consider how you build community that lasts. Host the barbecue. Go to the parade. Join something. Show up for something that is not optimized for your preferences. Sit next to a stranger at a World Cup watch party and find out where they are from. These gestures are not trivial. What we call “small talk” is only small if we don’t recognize its cumulative effect, which is rebuilding the third leg of the stool.

Because we really do need Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. It has been our superpower, and still can be.

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BY TREVOR POTTER

During a more than 40-year career holding positions such as Federal Election Commission (FEC) Chairman and president of Campaign Legal Center, the professional role that has always elicited the most interest from friends, colleagues and even total strangers is “Stephen Colbert’s super PAC lawyer.” I would not be surprised if it ended up on my tombstone!

It all began about 15 years ago, when I received a phone call out of the blue, setting in motion the chain of events that would lead me to assume that unexpected and unusual role.

On the line was a staffer from “The Colbert Report,” asking me questions about what a federal PAC was and what rules governed them. Not long afterwards, I found myself sitting across from Colbert himself in front of a studio audience for the first of what would turn out to be eleven episodes aimed at helping his audience understand what was happening to our campaign finance system in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United ruling.

During these episodes, which coincided with the 2012 election cycle, I served as Stephen’s lawyer and “favorite straight man” on set, witnessing his skillful use of comedy to shine a light on the legal loopholes that special interests use to spend secret and unlimited amounts of money to influence our elections. The series earned Stephen the prestigious Peabody Award for journalism. One survey later found that Colbert Report viewers were better educated on the issue of money in politics than those who relied on traditional news programs!

I recently sat down to remember and reflect on this unique experience, which also included the two of us going to the FEC to plead Stephen’s case for official approval of establishing his PAC, “Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow.”

Now, the Colbert Report is long gone, and Stephen is preparing to end a very successful run of more than ten years as host of “The Late Show” on CBS. The world moves on — both the good and the bad. The systemic weaknesses in campaign finance law we explored together in satirical fashion 15 years ago are being exploited today at levels never seen before. Consider, for example, that dark money groups spent $1.4 billion dollars during the 2024 election cycle — nearly four times the amount spent during the 2012 cycle. Over time, the proportion of dark money going to super PACs has greatly increased, adding to the lack of transparency and opportunities for corruption that have profoundly changed our political process for the worse.

Furthermore, things at the FEC have also gone from bad to worse since “The Colbert Report” series. In the intervening years, the commission has been mired in gridlock, failing to make any progress on important issues. More recently, a majority of FEC commissioners have voted in favor of campaign finance deregulation and have declined to enforce campaign finance laws at an alarming rate.

One key storyline during the Colbert series was explaining how easy it is for super PACs to get around requirements to operate independently of candidates for political office. In spring 2024, the FEC poured gasoline on this fire of unchecked coordination by wrongly concluding it was legal for candidates and supportive “independent” groups to work together on canvassing activities like door-knocking and voter mobilization.

This “advisory opinion,” as it is known in agency speak, opened the floodgates for an unprecedented level of coordination, with Elon Musk’s super PAC alone spending hundreds of millions of dollars in support of Donald Trump’s campaign. Campaign Legal Center has filed a lawsuit to get the advisory opinion struck down in court, arguing that it was contrary to law and exceeded the agency’s authority.

At its core, the opinion allows super PACs and other supposed “independent” organizations to spend millions effectively underwriting campaign expenses for the candidates they support, with much of that spending going undisclosed.

As I reflect on everything that has happened in our country since my time on “The Colbert Report,” it is impossible to ignore the contributions of the highest court in the land to what can fairly be described as the steady decline of democracy in the United States.

The negative consequences of Citizens United are well known, but the Court may not be finished with its hack job on our campaign finance laws. At CLC, we are anticipating a ruling soon in National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) v. FEC, in which the NRSC has asked the Court to nullify limits in place for the last 50 years, which it previously upheld, on how much money political parties can spend in coordination with federal candidates. Such a ruling would create yet another avenue for wealthy special interests to exert a corrupting influence on our elections.

Then there’s the Roberts-led Court rulings that have destroyed the federal Voting Rights Act, starting with Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 and ending with Louisiana v. Callais on April 29 of this year. These rulings, grounded in the false notion that systemic racism in our elections has been brought to heel, have opened the door for the kind of discrimination in voting laws and practices our country has not seen since the days of Jim Crow.

In 2019, the majority, once again led by Chief Justice Roberts, issued an outrageous opinion that closed the federal courts to those challenging egregious partisan gerrymanders. This ruling, in combination with Callais, threatens the fundamental principle of “one person, one vote,” which holds that all votes should count equally in our representative democracy, because it allows states to hide discrimination behind claims of partisan gerrymandering to avoid court review.

This is to say nothing of several rulings that have made it much more difficult to hold corrupt government officials accountable and a truly shocking 2024 ruling in Trump v. United States holding that the president of the United States is immune from being held to account for illegal activity if he was acting in his “official capacity.”

Campaign Legal Center’s role in this battle for the soul of our democracy is to find pathways to progress through legal actions and policy advocacy. It has been a difficult road. But in the areas of voting rights, redistricting, ethics and even campaign finance, we have achieved significant victories for voters in the face of determined opposition.

Just as important in this struggle, I recognize, are the efforts of those with massive audiences to help Americans understand the forces pushing our nation towards something that bears little resemblance to a representative democracy.

Stephen Colbert is clearly someone who feels called to use his platform to engage in this sort of civic education, reaching Americans who are not immersed in these issues. I wish Stephen all the best in whatever comes next, and hope that he and others in the entertainment industry will keep finding creative ways to ensure Americans remain informed and active in the fight for a more perfect union.

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When Donald Trump first burst onto the political scene, his most resonant battle cry was a promise to “drain the swamp,” a phrase that resonated with tens of millions of people, even those who may not have supported him.

But fast-forward to May 2026, and it’s become clearer than ever that (surprise!) he didn’t drain the swamp — he bought the real estate, built a luxury resort on it, and started charging the American taxpayer admission.

This blatant, out-in-the-open monetization of the presidency is precisely why we are seeing a massive erosion in his support. The corruption is no longer a matter of partisan debate or speculative reporting; it is now laid bare in official government filings and brazen backdoor legal maneuvers. If anyone in your life still needs definitive proof that the presidency is being treated as a private equity firm, please share this with them.

Part I: The 113-Page Roadmap to Insider Trading

Just days ago, Trump filed an official government ethics disclosure known as Form 278-T, a Periodic Transaction Report. Though he filed it months late and was forced to pay late fees, the document provides an unprecedented look at how official policy is being leveraged for private profit.

The form catalogs over 3,600 individual stock trades made during the first quarter of this year alone, totaling an estimated value of up to $750 million in personal trading volume. A close look at the timing reveals a pattern of a sitting president actively trading securities in companies directly affected by his own immediate policy decisions:

• Nvidia: Trump bought millions of dollars in Nvidia stock right around the time he agreed to reverse U.S. national security restrictions on selling advanced AI chips to China. Days later, he flew Nvidia’s CEO to China on Air Force One, cleared 10 Chinese firms to buy the chips, and watched the stock price climb 26%.

• Boeing: After purchasing millions in Boeing stock, Trump brought Boeing’s CEO on that same official trip to China, directly securing a deal to sell 200 airplanes to the Chinese government.

• TikTok: Trump heavily invested in Oracle at the exact same time he personally brokered their highly controversial deal to acquire TikTok.

• Defense and Crypto: He bought into Palantir while they actively competed for billions in government contracts, and snatched up crypto stocks while publicly championing the so-called “Clarity Act” — a bill the crypto industry is heavily lobbying for.

• Micro-Trading the News: In January, during a severe national egg shortage, Trump bought into Cal-Maine Foods (the nation’s largest egg producer) and sold it for a massive profit two months later. In February, he bought millions in Dell stock and immediately used his platform to tell the public to “go out and buy a Dell,” sending the stock surging 24%.

Historically, modern presidents have utilized independent blind trusts or liquidated their assets to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. Trump has completely shattered this norm, reportedly telling critics:

“I found out that nobody cared, and I’m allowed to.”

As a result, Forbes estimates his net worth has surged 60% since he returned to office, now sitting at $6.3 billion.

Part II: The $1.8 Billion Treasury Heist

If using the executive office to game the stock market wasn’t enough, we just witnessed what can only be described as a coordinated raid on the U.S. Treasury.

Earlier this year, Trump filed a legally baseless, $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS — an agency that he, as head of the Executive Branch, completely controls. It was a farce from the start: a president suing his own government so he could effectively negotiate a multi-billion-dollar settlement with himself. We warned you about it here:

When a judge-appointed team of independent legal experts reviewed the case and concluded it was absolute nonsense that should be thrown out of court, Trump’s team didn’t wait for the hammer to fall. They voluntarily dropped the suit because they had already engineered a backdoor settlement with the Justice Department, which doesn’t require judicial approval.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the creation of a $1.776 (🙄) billion “anti-weaponization” fund carved directly out of taxpayer money. Disguised as a fund to compensate “victims of lawfare,” this is a massive, unchecked slush fund. It will be run by five political loyalists appointed by the Attorney General and removable by the president. They will have total, unilateral discretion to hand out our tax dollars to Trump and his political allies with:

• Zero court oversight

• Zero public transparency

• Zero legal accountability

As a matter of law, the Attorney General has a fiduciary duty to protect taxpayer money from fraudulent claims. Instead, the highest law enforcement officers in the country have entered into a structural conspiracy to treat the U.S. Treasury like a campaign piggy bank.

Part III: The Turning Tide and How We Fight Back

The sheer, unapologetic audacity of this self-dealing is exactly why the ground is shifting beneath Trump’s feet. Everyday Americans are realizing that treating national policy like a series of personal business transactions is the textbook definition of corruption — and the opposite of what he promised to do.

Watchdogs have sprung into action, filing amicus briefs and demanding absolute transparency. But to fix a system this compromised, we need structural guardrails.

Let's ACTUALLY Drain the Swamp

We must flood the phone lines of our elected representatives and demand immediate legislative action:

1. Pass the Ban Presidential Plunder of Taxpayer Funds Act: This bill would permanently block a sitting President, Vice President, and their immediate families from collecting any settlement payouts from the United States government.

2. Enact a Total Stock Trading Ban: We must support a bipartisan expansion of congressional trading bans to explicitly include the President and Vice President, making it illegal to trade individual securities while in office.

3. Restore the Office of Government Ethics (OGE): We must codify strict independence and subpoena power for the OGE so that a president cannot simply fire its director and install political loyalists to erase late fees and ignore conflicts.

The swamp wasn’t drained; it was weaponized for profit. Share this information, sound the alarm with your neighbors, and call your representatives today. The U.S. Treasury belongs to the American people, not the president’s personal portfolio.

And that shouldn’t be considered a conservative or a progressive belief — but an All-American one.

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