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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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This is a battle for the very soul of representation in Florida. They are redrawing the lines again, and this time, they aren’t even pretending to follow the rules.

At Bright America, we believe that when the drawing of maps moves into backrooms and “closed doors,” democracy begins to flicker. Our job is to keep the lights on. Today, we’re breaking down a high-stakes legal challenge to Florida’s latest congressional map — led by our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center (CLC).

The 2026 “Partisan National Redistricting War”

We are currently witnessing what legal experts call an “unprecedented mid-decade race to the bottom.” Across the country, states are shredding their established maps to grab more power ahead of the 2026 midterms. Florida has just taken the lead in that race.

In April 2026, the Florida Legislature “rammed” through a new map — the 2026 Plan — in just two days. This wasn’t a standard update; it was a surgical strike designed to create four new Republican districts at the expense of Florida’s voters.

The most alarming parts of the 2026 Plan:

Constitutional Defiance: Governor DeSantis extraordinarily unilaterally declared that Florida’s Fair Districts Amendment (FDA) — which voters passed in 2010 to stop gerrymandering — is unconstitutional.

Admitted Partisanship: The map drawer from the Governor’s office admitted under oath that he used partisan data to draw every single district in the 2026 Plan.

Silencing Cities: The new map fractures Tampa and Orlando into three separate districts each, specifically designed to “crack” and “pack” voters to ensure a dominant partisan advantage.

The Legal Shield for Florida Voters

On May 4, 2026, Campaign Legal Center (CLC), filed a 39-page complaint (Thompson-Wynn v. Byrd) on behalf of individual Florida voters to stop this map in its tracks.

CLC is holding the line for the Fair Districts Amendment. Passed by 62.9% of Florida voters in 2010, this amendment explicitly states: “No apportionment plan or district shall be drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent”.

By challenging the 2026 Plan, CLC is fighting to ensure the August primaries and November midterms aren’t decided before a single ballot is cast.

Help Fuel the Case!

Fueling the Citizen Response

If CLC provides the legal expertise, Bright America provides the civic fuel. Litigation can feel distant and abstract, buried under hundreds of pages of filings. We are here to bring those facts to your doorstep.

Our Role in This Fight:

Transparency in Real-Time: While the 2026 Plan was drawn in a “secretive process” over just two weeks, we’re here to show you exactly how it impacts our country and your freedoms.

Translating the Tactics: We explain the surgical methods that were used to dilute your voting power and crack communities apart.

Mobilizing Awareness: We believe a well-informed electorate is a politician’s greatest fear. By helping you understand the Thompson-Wynn v. Byrd case, we empower you to speak up before the map becomes permanent.

What’s Next?

Democracy is not a spectator sport. CLC is doing the heavy lifting in the courtroom, but they need a public that understands the stakes.

We’ll be following this litigation every step of the way as we head toward the 2026 elections. This map was built to favor incumbents and political parties; we are here to ensure it honors the voters instead.

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For more than a decade, legal experts and court watchers have been predicting the demise of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) at the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts, but foresight does not make the reality of what happened in the final days of April any easier to absorb. A 6-3 majority handed down an utterly disastrous and disingenuous ruling on April 29 in Louisiana v. Callais. In the hours following this ruling, Campaign Legal Center Senior Vice President — and noted voting rights attorney — Bruce V. Spiva, released a powerful statement condemning the majority’s decision.

The case that produced the Callais ruling centered on Louisiana’s congressional map, where, in 2024, Black Louisianans, who make up a third of the state’s population, were able to elect two representatives of their choice for the first time in history. Louisiana has six members of Congress. The map that enabled this was put in place after a successful legal challenge under Section 2 of the VRA.

The majority’s ruling overturning this fair map (which CLC argued against in two amicus briefs) has broad implications that could produce the largest drop in Black representation in Congress our nation has ever witnessed.

Before Callais, the bar for successfully challenging racial vote dilution — the legal term for implementing racially discriminatory voting maps — was substantial but achievable to remedy egregious violations. Now, while Section 2 still technically exists on paper, it is a “dead letter,” as Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent.

The Supreme Court has, in essence, rewritten a law passed by Congress in 1982, which explicitly added a results-based test to the VRA for proving that maps are discriminatory. But according to the Callais ruling, proving that a map results in racial discrimination is no longer sufficient. Instead, plaintiffs must essentially demonstrate that the sole intent behind the creation of a new voting map is to diminish representation for historically disenfranchised communities.

We are already seeing several southern states attempting to manipulate their voting maps in ways that would make it much more difficult for communities of color to elect representatives of their choice — an unconscionable turning back of the clock to an era where no laws existed to enforce the intent of the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. There is every reason to believe that this is just the beginning.

What does this all mean in the short term?

With the doors to federal courts now all but shut for challenging racially discriminatory maps under the VRA, and an outrageous Supreme Court ruling from 2016 saying federal courts are powerless to settle partisan gerrymandering disputes (Rucho v. Common Cause), the redistricting race to the bottom that began last summer is likely to accelerate.

This does not mean, however, that every attempt to gerrymander congressional and legislative district maps is insulated from legal challenges.

Just days after the Callais decision, Campaign Legal Center filed a lawsuit in state court on behalf of Florida voters to block a new ultra-gerrymandered congressional map. Florida happens to be one of eight places where the state constitution forbids partisan gerrymandering.

Voters amended the Florida constitution in 2010 through a ballot initiative, adding the following provision: “No apportionment plan or district shall be drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent.” Yet the entire process of adopting Florida’s new map has openly and explicitly been directed at increasing the number of seats for one party.

The Callais ruling has no practical impact on states that have anti-partisan gerrymandering provisions in their constitutions. Campaign Legal Center has pursued multiple legal challenges to gerrymandering on state constitutional grounds. These efforts produced a fair congressional map last year for voters in Utah, and our challenge to a mid-decade gerrymander in Missouri is ongoing.

We also believe that it is illegal for states to use Callais as a justification for suspending elections before the 2026 midterms. The governor and secretary of state of Louisiana are testing the legal limits of this commonsense principle by invoking emergency powers to cancel the ongoing primary election there, even though some ballots have already been cast! Civil rights groups mobilized immediately to challenge this move in court. States that attempt to do the same can certainly expect broad opposition from the pro-democracy coalition.

While the Supreme Court has granted Louisiana’s request to expedite its order to allow it to draw new maps, the Supreme Court’s decision in Callais does not justify Louisiana’s extreme actions here. Callais did not include an order for Louisiana, or any other states, to act on its ruling now. Rather, the Supreme Court’s longstanding position has been that federal court rulings cannot disrupt election planning, even many months before ballots are cast.

Powerful solutions to counter Callais.

The Supreme Court’s ruling should be a clarion call to Congress and state lawmakers to use every tool available to preserve our multiracial democracy.

Callais presents two paths for our nation to choose on the issue of redistricting. One leads to a continuation of the race to the bottom we’ve seen over the last year, where voters are treated like pawns in a battle for political power. The other leads to meaningful reform that could remake our politics into something more responsive to all Americans. The second path requires elected officials from across the political spectrum to work together on behalf of all voters.

Help Fuel the Solutions

In the PARTISAN gerrymandering context, this de-escalation could be achieved through federal legislation establishing nonpartisan criteria that must be used to create fair congressional district maps in every state. Importantly, this remedy is completely within the power of Congress under the elections clause of the U.S. Constitution — no permission from the Supreme Court required. Such federal legislation would outlaw partisan gerrymandering nationwide and again empower federal courts to hear challenges to partisan maps.

It is also vital for states to pursue solutions that can blunt the impact of Callais and previous harmful rulings like Shelby County v. Holder (2013) on our multi-racial democracy. Nine states, thus far, have risen to the occasion by enacting state Voting Rights Acts. These laws, the most recent of which passed in Maryland, give voters the power to challenge discrimination in voting laws and practices on the local level. This is significant, considering that a large majority of federal voting rights cases over the decades have targeted discriminatory laws in counties and cities.

A seismic event like Callais also requires serious consideration of useful structural changes to our democracy. The Court’s decision exacerbates the flaws in our current system for electing members of the House of Representatives, where single-member districts and winner-take-all elections limit opportunities for true representation.

Many other democracies around the world and even some local governments in this country have moved beyond winner-take-all in favor of proportional representation, which, in its most basic form, means seats are divided according to the percentage of votes each party receives. This system, which would involve the creation of multi-member congressional districts (which existed in the United States for many years), has the potential to overcome the anti-democratic effects of both racial and partisan gerrymandering.

The existence of these and other possible solutions in a post-Callais world means the fight for a truly representative democracy must continue. Six justices on the Supreme Court have dealt a serious blow to this effort, but they have not erased the spirit that inspired the Civil Rights Movement generations ago.

That spirit lives on in the work of Campaign Legal Center and our many allies who understand that the fight for a stronger, fairer, more inclusive American democracy requires constant vigilance and dedication. We are committed to using every tool at our disposal to fight for fair representation and protect every American’s freedom to participate meaningfully 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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Six decades ago, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 transformed American democracy from a theoretical ideal into a functional reality.

It did not arrive as a gift. It was a hard-won victory forged in the crucible of Selma and Birmingham. It was the response to decades of poll taxes, literacy tests, and a systematic regime of terror designed to ensure the ballot box remained a private club. The law was blunt because the problem was surgical: it established federal oversight for bad actors, provided tools to challenge maps that diluted minority power, and stated — in no uncertain terms — that the right to vote was the baseline of the American contract.

For over half a century, it worked. It wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t a cure-all, but it provided the stability our system required for freedom to grow.

Last week, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais effectively ended that chapter. In a 6-3 decision, the Court’s majority didn’t just tweak the rules; they essentially gutted Section 2 of the VRA — the primary tool used to challenge electoral maps that discriminate. Justice Kagan, in a blistering dissent, called it a “death knell.” For anyone who believes that the integrity of the process is more important than the temporary victory of a party, she was being remarkably literal.

The Reality on the Ground

The practical consequences aren’t a distant “maybe.” They are happening in real-time, right in the middle of a 2026 election cycle.

• Louisiana has suspended its May primaries to redraw congressional maps.

• Texas, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio are moving to reshape districts months before voters head to the polls.

• Twenty-eight active lawsuits defending minority representation have been plunged into a legal void.

We are watching the “Purcell Principle” — the idea that you don’t change the rules right before an election — being tossed out the window. Changing the map while the primary is already in progress is the political equivalent of a referee moving the goalposts while the ball is mid-flight. It doesn’t just hurt one side; it makes the whole game look rigged.

For Americans who value fairness, stable institutions, and the rule of law, this isn’t a “social justice” issue — it’s a system integrity issue.

The same principles that make a contract enforceable or a court system trustworthy are the ones that make an election legitimate. When rules of democratic participation become variables to be optimized by the party in power, the entire system loses its “market value.”

The founders feared concentrated power above all else. They built a system of checks and balances because they knew that majorities, if left unchecked, would eventually cannibalize the very rules that put them there. Gerrymandering — racial or partisan — is that abuse made into policy. It doesn’t produce better representation; it produces entrenchment. It fuels the “two-party food fight” that exhausts the exhausted majority of Americans who just want a government that functions.

When you protect incumbents from the voters, you remove the only quality-control mechanism democracy has.

The Road Ahead

Bright America doesn’t claim to have a silver bullet for what comes next. No one does.

But we know this: the legal battle to protect voting rights didn’t end last week. It just shifted terrain. Our strategic litigation partner, the Campaign Legal Center (CLC), has spent decades building the legal infrastructure to fight on this new ground. Their attorneys were in the trenches before this ruling, and they are already pivoting to meet this new reality.

This work doesn’t have a finish line. The VRA was reauthorized four times over fifty years precisely because its architects knew that rights, once won, require constant maintenance.

We are at a maintenance moment.

Time will tell how this ruling reshapes the November elections, but the principle remains unchanged even if the law did. We aren’t asking for agreement on every policy. We are asking for a shared insistence that the rules be fair, that maps represent people instead of protecting incumbents, and that six justices don’t get the final word on the voice of millions.

The ground shifted. Our footing remains the same.

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In 2006, I was a young staffer on Capitol Hill watching the Iraq War unravel in real time.

The costs were mounting, the justifications were shifting, and back home, the Abramoff and DeLay scandals were exposing a web of corruption so brazen it was impossible to ignore. The country felt the rot before the politicians admitted it. We wanted change.

We got it — in waves.

The 2006 midterms swept in a new majority. 2008 brought a “transformational” presidency. Two years later, the Tea Party. Then the backlash to the backlash. For two decades, we have been sprinting from one “most important election of our lifetime” to the next, yet the ground beneath our feet feels less stable than ever.

The Exhaustion of the Tribe

What we’re living through in 2026 feels familiar, but the scale has changed. The speed is faster; the stakes feel higher. If you talk to people outside the Beltway, they aren’t just angry — they’re worn out. They’ve tuned out not because they’ve stopped caring, but because caring at a national level has become a high-cost, low-reward endeavor that yields nothing but vitriol, anger, and/or stress.

We have mistaken the “echo” for the “source.”

This was the haunting observation made by former Senator Ben Sasse on 60 Minutes last night. Sasse, facing a terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, spoke with the clarity of a man who no longer has time for the performance of politics.

“I think our national political dysfunction is an echo of larger problems,” Sasse said. “I think your fundamental political community is your neighborhood, and your city hall... Right now we are sacrificing a lot of our national politics to weird folks who want their main community to be their political tribe at a federal level.”

The Fork in the Road

Sasse’s point is the “Culture First” manifesto: When our local communities — our “thick” relationships in churches, Rotary clubs, and neighborhoods — become thin, we try to fill that void with the “thin” community of national partisan identity. But it is a hunger that politics can never satisfy.

As we look toward the 2026 elections, we face a genuine fork in the road:

There’s the Path of the Quick Fix… The demand for a “strong hand” and simple answers. This is the old temptation to use federal power to bypass the messiness of persuasion.

And then there’s the Path of Civic Infrastructure… The “slower, harder” work of rebuilding shared norms and local connection.

The Framers designed our system with “friction” for a reason. They knew that massive change without broad consent doesn’t lead to progress; it leads to collapse or tyranny. But that friction only works if the culture understands why it’s there. If we don’t trust our neighbor, we won’t trust the system that requires us to compromise with them.

The Long Arc of Renewal

What does it mean for culture to lead politics? It means acknowledging that before the right laws can pass, the right values have to take root. Before coalitions form in legislatures, they have to form at the school board and the community center.

Politics is downstream from culture — not the other way around.

As Sasse put it, “Unless people know the thickness of their local community, it’s hard to make sense of what national politics are for.”

This is why Bright America exists. We aren’t focused on the next 24-hour news cycle; we are focused on the “longer arc.” We are looking for the leaders who refuse to trade one form of dysfunction for another — those who see the U.S. Constitution not as a weapon for their tribe, but as the architecture of a free society.

Renewal is possible. The country has lost, and found again, its footing before. But it has never happened from the top down. It starts with the slow work. It starts with the person next door.

“Knock, knock,” a wave, a smile — it’s where we begin

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We are currently witnessing what might be the most audacious raid on the American Treasury in the history of the Republic. With all the calamities pouring forth from the White House, no one would blame the American people from being unaware of a dangerous case moving quietly through the legal system: Trump v. Internal Revenue Service.

President Donald Trump is currently suing the very government he leads for a staggering $10 billion in damages. To put that number in perspective, that is more than 80% of the entire annual budget for the IRS. And I’m about to explain how he’s turning the public Treasury into a personal ATM.

The “Self-Settlement” Absurdity

The core of this outrage is a conflict of interest so blatant it feels like a fever dream. The President has sued an agency he oversees, which is defended by a Justice Department (DOJ) filled with his own appointees. Trump himself didn’t even try to hide the game, recently telling reporters:

“I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself.”

Under current norms, the President effectively controls both the plaintiff and the defendant in this litigation. This creates a “collusive litigation” environment where the public’s treasury is left entirely undefended. Justice Department lawyers are currently “struggling” (according to NY Times interviews) to decide how to respond, caught between their duty to the public and a White House executive order that binds them to the President’s own interpretation of the law.

The Secret “Voluntary Dismissal” Loophole

What makes this situation worse is the possibility of a “ghost” settlement — a massive payout that happens entirely behind closed doors. Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 41, a plaintiff can voluntarily dismiss a case at any time before the defendant files a formal answer.

Because the DOJ has repeatedly requested extensions to “engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter,” they have not yet filed a formal defense. If Trump has his government cut a check to himself in a private settlement, the only thing the public might ever see on the court docket is a simple notice of voluntary dismissal. The case would vanish, the legal questions would never be answered by a judge (who would surely throw the case out), and the money would simply disappear from the Treasury’s Judgment Fund.

Payouts in the Dark

You might think $10 billion would be hard to hide, but the technical mechanics of the Treasury’s payment systems are shockingly ill-equipped for this level of “shakedown.” The Treasury’s Secure Payment System actually has a 10-digit limit for single payments, capping them at $99,999,999.99. For a $10 billion heist, the administration would have to break the payout into dozens of separate hundred-million-dollar chunks just to get the system to accept it.

These payments are not reported instantaneously, meaning the money could be long gone before a single taxpayer realizes the vault has been emptied.

The Emerging “MAGA Grift”

This isn’t a one-off event, but a pattern. We’ve already seen the DOJ settle a lawsuit from Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, for $1.2 million after he sued on the grounds of “malicious prosecution”. Lawmakers are now warning of an “emerging MAGA grift” where allies of the President sue the government as a plaintiff, and then dismiss their case after Trump administration lawyers offer a big settlement in lieu of a trial (where a judge, jury, or public could hear the feeble arguments).

Trump has suggested he would donate any winnings to charity, but critics note that even if he did, it would still be the American taxpayer — not the President — forced to fund his personal philanthropy. And Trump does have a long history of giving away other people’s money rather than his own, then taking the credit.

The Fight Back: Stopping the Plunder

The good news is that the alarm bells are ringing. A coalition of lawmakers is moving to install the guardrails our system clearly lacks.

But, none of us should be naive. The likelihood that any of these pass, much less get signed by Trump into law while he’s in office, is practically zero — but that’s not the point. Our members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats, need to hear that we’re upset about this, so that pressure bubbles up to the White House that this thievery is not worth the political cost.

Here’s what we should be encouraging our elected leaders, friends, and family to support:

• The Ban Presidential Plunder of Taxpayer Funds Act: Introduced by Senators Warren and Schumer alongside Representatives Raskin and Min, this bill would flatly prohibit any sitting President, Vice President, or their families from collecting settlement payments from the federal government.

• The Corruption Clawback Act: This legislation, already introduced by Senator Schiff, would create a mechanism to forcibly retrieve funds that have already been siphoned off through these abusive claims.

• The Stop Presidential Embezzlement Act: Senator Ron Wyden has proposed taxing any damages a President receives from the government at 100%, effectively negating the profit motive for suing the public.

We are now waiting for a “notice of voluntary dismissal” to hit the docket. That’s our first clue the worst case scenario has occured, and the check has likely already cleared.

We must demand that the DOJ zealously defend the public interest and that Congress passes these protections immediately. The integrity of our judicial process depends on whether the Presidency is a public service or a private business opportunity.

Do you think the Department of Justice should be allowed to settle a lawsuit with the President in secret?

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A fundamental American right is being tested. While exercising their First Amendment rights to observe and film federal law enforcement, peaceful protesters and observers have faced a disturbing reality: violent retaliation, intimidation, and arrests at the hands of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents.

It’s happened across the country, but some of the most disturbing evidence came during ICE’s intense focus on Minneapolis.

At Bright America, we believe that the rule of law is only meaningful when it applies equally to everyone — especially those who wield the most power in our government. That is why we are proud to highlight the latest work of our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center (CLC), fueled in part by the Bright America movement, as they take the fight for our constitutional rights to the courts.

The Case: Tincher v. Noem

CLC has stepped into the active case of Tincher v. Noem. This lawsuit, filed on behalf of Minnesotans who were targeted by federal agents, seeks to halt what can only be described as a dangerous “illegal power grab”.

The core of the issue is simple: documenting government officials as they perform their duties lies at the very heart of the First Amendment. When federal agents use force to silence those watching them, they aren’t just breaking the law; they are undermining the foundation of our democracy.

Help Defend Our Freedoms

A Coalition of Expertise

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of this fight is who has stepped up to join it. CLC filed an amicus brief supported by 39 former career civil servants from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). These aren’t political operatives — they are professionals who served in the DOJ’s Special Litigation Section under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

These experts, who spent their careers eliminating patterns of illegal conduct by law enforcement, are sounding the alarm. They argue that federal agents in Minnesota are engaging in the exact same unconstitutional policing that the DOJ has condemned in the past.

Why This Matters

Presidential orders to enforce immigration policies do not grant federal agents a “blank check” to ignore the Constitution. Whether an officer is a local beat cop or a federal agent, they must be held to the same constitutional standards.

If we allow federal agencies to operate without constitutional restraint, we set a precedent where our rights to peaceful assembly and free speech become “conditional” rather than fundamental.

Bright America stands with CLC because we believe constitutional protections must be more than theoretical ideals — they must be enforceable guarantees. By supporting this litigation, we are ensuring that the government remains accountable to the people it serves.

Anything else would be un-American.

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Over the weekend, Donald Trump shared an AI-generated image depicting himself as Jesus. The backlash from his own religious allies was so swift that he did something we rarely see: he deleted the post.

While the incident was mocked as another “Trump being Trump” moment, it highlights the profound absurdity of our current political era. We are witnessing an administration consumed by petty grievances and the construction of a bizarre personal mythology. But this relentless circus distracts the public from a far more severe structural danger: When an executive operates under the delusion of a divine mandate, earthly constraints disappear.

Trump himself has signaled this intent to move beyond the law. He once claimed that his own morals were the only thing that could truly constrain him on the world stage—suggesting that statutes, treaties, and constitutional boundaries are secondary to his personal whims.

“My own morality, my own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me.”

DONALD TRUMP

An executive branch functioning without boundaries inevitably breeds systemic corruption. The Founders anticipated leaders driven by unbounded ego; they did not trust the “internal morals” of any one man to protect the people. Instead, they built a strict framework of checks and balances to contain them, designing a system where “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

For the past year, we have relied almost entirely on the courts to maintain those boundaries. Thanks to the incredible work of our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center, there have been the critical legal challenges necessary for the judiciary to play an indispensable role in preserving the rule of law. Federal judges have consistently blocked unprecedented executive overreach and demanded basic institutional accountability. They have forced this administration to operate, however begrudgingly, within the confines of the law.

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However, the courts cannot safeguard the republic in isolation. The Founders never intended for the judiciary to serve as the sole bulwark against executive abuse.

Congress must reclaim its rightful constitutional authority. For years, the legislative branch has abdicated its role as a co-equal power, with lawmakers trading rigorous oversight for partisan convenience. Congress (regardless of party) has surrendered its institutional prerogatives over decades, especially when the President is from the same party. They have invited the exact corruption the Constitution was written to prevent.

We need a fundamental shake-up. We need leaders with real courage to utilize legislative power as a firm check against the presidency. I am proud to see serious candidates stepping into the arena to challenge this complacency. People like my friend Olivia Troye understand these stakes; they recognize the urgent necessity for principled adults to LEAD beyond a press conference, and finally take action.

Restoring the balance of power requires the voting public to demand it. We cannot expect a broken institution to fix itself without external pressure.

Until Congress seats leadership willing to exercise its constitutional mandate, we must fight on the terrain we possess. This means pursuing accountability through the legal system and supporting organizations like the Campaign Legal Center as they enforce (and reconstruct) robust guardrails against corruption.

The American republic requires constant maintenance. We protect the Constitution not by placing our faith in the “morals” of a leader, but by defending the institutions designed to uphold the law.

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During President Donald Trump’s second term in office, his administration has consistently sought to unconstitutionally extend executive branch power in ways that dictate who can vote in our elections and how elections are administered. The president’s latest bid for control over our elections has produced yet another illegal executive order. This time, the main target is one the president is fond of blaming for electoral results he does not like: voting by mail.

The executive order was signed on March 31. Less than 48 hours later, Campaign Legal Center, alongside Democracy Defenders Fund, filed a lawsuit to block it on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens, Secure Families Initiative and Arizona Students’ Association. There’s a very simple reason why we were able to take legal action so quickly — it is based on the same faulty grounds as last year’s executive order on elections.

We challenged that order in court, because it illegally claimed a role for the executive branch in our elections where none exists in the Constitution or current law. Multiple federal courts have blocked the first executive order, and we fully expect the same to happen with this one.

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So, what does this new order purport to do? In short, it seeks to impose a series of new requirements for mail-in voting; create a national federal database of “verified” eligible voters based on faulty information; and restrict the ability of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to send mail-in ballots to voters not on that list. It also threatens to punish states that fail to comply with the order by withholding federal funding and prosecuting state and local election officials for failure to comply.

Implementing this executive order would have clear ramifications for voters and our democracy. States would face immense pressure to use inaccurate information to administer voting by mail — improperly disenfranchising voters in the process — and USPS could become a tool for denying untold numbers of Americans access to a safe and reliable method of voting.

But the Constitution allocates the power to run our elections only to the states and gives Congress the backup power to pass laws regulating the “time, place and manner” of federal elections. There is no role in the Constitution for the president to overrule the states or Congress concerning election procedures.

On occasion, Congress has used its authority to provide specific federal agencies and departments with limited roles in elections. Examples include the Federal Election Commission (created in 1974), which enforces campaign finance laws, and the Election Assistance Commission (2002), which is primarily tasked with providing support to states for election administration.

Notably, Congress created these agencies to be independent from the White House, but the Trump administration is testing the idea that such agencies should even exist. An executive order issued last year claims control over these agencies’ regulatory powers, and in a case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year, the president asserts total authority to fire the heads of independent agencies.

That separation of powers is even more pronounced when it comes to the USPS — only Congress has the constitutional authority to regulate the U.S. mail. The president cannot order USPS to take actions such as limiting the delivery of mail ballots, which would be contrary to its universal service mandate or the governing procedures established for it by Congress.

It is difficult to look at this administration’s actions and believe that the goal is anything other than dictating who can vote in our elections to assist candidates of the president’s own party. The stated reasons for this are grounded in discredited falsehoods about fraudulent voting. Fortunately, the prospects of defeating these actions are good, because the law is firmly on the side of those, like Campaign Legal Center, who know that the president and his allies in the administration do not have the authority to meddle with our elections.

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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