The problem with the Stop Insider Trading Act is simple: This bill doesn’t actually solve the problem of members of Congress using their positions to get rich. Worse, Republicans are selling this legislation as anti-corruption reform, but they added voting-related provisions Republicans haven’t been able to pass in their overtly anti-voter bills like the SAVE Act. So, the Stop Insider Trading Act is best understood as a Trojan Horse that looks like they’re taking on corruption but in reality is just another Republican attempt to retain GOP political power.

Campaign Legal Center issued a statement opposing SITA by summarizing its flaws: “SITA does not actually ban congressional stock trading, and it will thus not remove the cloud of distrust that hands over lawmakers’ suspicious stock trades. Moreover, this legislation does nothing to limit members’ ability to use official actions to benefit the stocks they own, even if no trading occurs. Finally, SITA’s limited ban on stock purchases creates exceptions that swallow the rule.”

What would SITA do? It would ban members of Congress from making some new stock purchases, require advance notice for stock sales, and levy penalties for any Congressmembers who break those rules.

Each of those new rules on their own would be a step in the right direction. However, SITA is missing the key rules that would make it a meaningful stock trading ban. The most glaring omission: SITA doesn’t prohibit members of Congress from selling stocks while in office.

Yes, of course, Congressmembers buying stocks is one way they can enrich themselves with insider information. Many Congressmembers have bought stocks related to the industries that they’re supposed to be overseeing as part of their committee assignments. There’s no escaping that there’s an inherent conflict of interest because they have privileged information while making those purchases.

For example, Senator Susan Collins (ME) sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and this spring she bought shares in pharma giant Pfizer. While serving on the Senate Committee for Armed Services, then-Senator and now Department of Homeland Secretary Markwayne Mullin, purchased stock in the major defense contractor Raytheon and the oil companies Chevron and Conoco Phillips, mere days before the Trump Administration invaded Venezuela. The list goes on. These are just a couple of prominent examples.

But members of Congress have also sold large shares of stocks at opportune times, while having insider information, and they’ve made more (or have lost less) money because of when they sold their stocks. As we’ve written here previously: Rep. Rob Bresnahan (PA-8) dumped stocks in Medicaid providers valued at roughly $130,000 while having access to privileged information about the Republicans’ mega-bill that gutted Medicaid spending. So, Congressmembers selling stock is a central part of the corruption.

Meanwhile, SITA also contains so many other loopholes that anyone in Congress interested in enriching themselves off insider information still has plenty of opportunity to use their position for personal gain. According to Campaign Legal Center, SITA specifically applies exceptions to:

• Crypto currency purchases

• Commodity purchases

• Bond purchases

• Industry-specific mutual fund or exchange-traded fund purchases

• Any purchases made from a non-blind trust

That’s a lot of ways to make money off trading as a Congressmember that aren’t covered by the bill.

What does SITA restrict? Access to the ballot box. “Republicans have corrupted their so-called stock trading bill with a decaying piece of the SAVE America Act corpse,” Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) said on the House floor. SITA would impose a nationwide requirement that voters show ID when voting in a federal election – one of President Trump’s demands ahead of the midterms.

We can also understand SITA better when we understand that its sponsor is Rep. Bryan Steil (WI). Steil also sponsored the Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act that would’ve enshrined national extreme voter ID requirements, made DHS the clearinghouse for deciding which Americans can vote, and many more actions that are incompatible with Americans’ Constitutional right to vote. Steil led the politically motivated investigations into ActBlue, the online platform that Democratic candidates use to raise money from grassroots donors. And his biggest political contributors include members of the financial services industry.

Hiding voting restrictions in a bill that looks from a distance like a government reform is a politically shrewd way for Republicans to try pass voter restrictions. Democrats running for reelection in swing districts could have a very hard time voting no on a bill that ostensibly stops insider trading – because a majority of Americans consider Congress corrupt and support anti-corruption reforms, and because Democratic incumbents need to prove their anti-corruption stance to win back those voters. So, by putting this bill up for a vote, Republicans have put those Democratic members in a tough position.

The deceptive nature of this bill is also why we’re glad you’re here and reading this. Chatting about SITA’s flaws might not be the fastest way to make friends at a barbecue this weekend, but we have to keep each other educated about the enormous gap between what Republican lawmakers say they’re doing for the American people and what they’re actually doing. Steil and his Republican allies may be stumping on ending corruption, but they’re perpetuating it – while also trying to make it harder for the American people to kick them out of office in November.

You can find out more about her and support her race here.

You can learn more about how Gov. Healey has focused on lowering costs and making life better for every family in Massachusetts, and her re-election campaign, at maurahealey.com.

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Congressional Republicans have helped President Trump and his administration get away with so many acts of brazen corruption— including flagrant nepotism, self-dealing, and handouts to themselves and their biggest donors. But confirming the president’s former defense lawyer as Attorney General would be a new low point. This should shock everyone.

Americans can’t get numb to this level of corruption. That Republicans in Congress are even considering this nomination is a reminder that they and President Trump are working in tandem to dismantle what’s left of our democratic norms and establish a straight up authoritarian government.

It may be obvious, but let’s take a step back and remember that the Attorney General heads the Department of Justice (DOJ) and is considered the nation’s top law enforcement officer. The Attorney General directs prosecutions, supervises the FBI and other agencies, and gives legal advice not just to the president but the head of other government agencies.

Blanche has already served as Deputy Attorney General and Acting Attorney General. During his tenure, he led prosecutions into Trump’s critics like New York Attorney General Leticia James and former FBI Director James Comey; spearheaded investigations into nonprofits like the Southern Poverty Law Center; supported a potential slush fund for people, including January 6th rioters, who claimed that the federal government had been “weaponized” against them; and oversaw the disastrous release of the Epstein files. The DOJ has also helped execute the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.

More than 1,200 former DOJ employees spanning 14 administrations signed a letter opposing Blanche’s nomination. “Since his confirmation as Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche has shown time and again that his guiding star is fealty to the President, not the Constitution,” wrote Stacey Young, executive director of Justice Connection, which provides direct support to current and recent DOJ employees facing attacks by the Trump Administration. The letter says that Blanche has “utterly failed to abide by” the “oath to support and defend the Constitution, not the occupant of the White House.” During Blanche’s confirmation hearings, Democratic senators pressed him on his personal connection to Trump.

Blanche served as President Trump’s personal attorney from 2023 to 2025. The conflict of interest here is so glaring that it doesn’t need any explanation. During the confirmation hearings, Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, including Senators Mazie Hirono (HI) and Cory Booker (NJ) brought up the concern that Blanche would be more loyal to President Trump than the country. When asked whether he’s personally aligned with Trump, Blanche responded, “I’m his lawyer – was his lawyer…” He then clarified that he now works for the government. Later, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) called him “Trump’s personal henchman.”

Before serving as Trump’s personal lawyer, Blanche had served as an attorney for Paul Manafort and others whose names have made headlines for their high-profile corruption charges.

Here’s the other thing: It’s not as though as Trump’s personal attorney Blanche just drafted some personal documents related to one of his divorces or real estate purchases. He represented the current president in highly charged political cases wherein Trump’s personal interests were pitted against national interests. These cases include:

The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, the “hush money” case. In 2023, Manhattan District Attorney Alan Bragg brought criminal charges against Trump, claiming that he’d falsified business records related to payments made to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. Trump had allegedly made the payments to buy Daniels’ silence over their affair, to help him win the election. In May 2024, Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

Blanche was the lead trial attorney defending Trump in that case.

United States v. Donald J. Trump, the case about federal classified documents. In 2023, Special Counsel Jack Smith brought charges against Trump over classified federal documents found at Mar-a-Lago after Trump left office. The documents were found during an investigation about the Jan. 6^th attacks on the U.S. Capitol. That case did not ultimately proceed to trial.

Blanche represented Trump as part of the defense team that had sought to get the charges dismissed.

United States v. Donald J. Trump, the case about election interference. This one is mind-blowing. In 2023, a Grand Jury indicted Trump on charges that he’d conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. “Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to stay in power. So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he’d actually won,” reads the indictment.

The defense team argued that the prosecution infringed on presidential immunity. In July 2024, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority accepted the defense team’s rationale and decided that President Trump has wide-ranging immunity from criminal liability for his official acts and absolute immunity for some “core” acts. The ACLU explained, “The court granted absolute immunity to President Trump’s use of the Justice Department for fraudulent purposes.”

Blanche represented Trump in United States v. Donald Trump.

Let’s just pause here and take in again: Congressional Republicans are seriously considering confirming as Attorney General of the United States a man who defended the sitting president against charges that he’d conspired to overturn the results of a federal election.

It may be possible, though still unlikely, that this will be a bridge too far even for this Republican Congress. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), chair of the Judiciary Committee, has yet to schedule a vote. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), a lame duck, is holding out on confirming Blanche, reportedly because Blanche wouldn’t guarantee in writing that the plan to create a so-called “anti-weaponization fund”-- a taxpayer-funded $1.8 billion slush fund that would pay people who said they were victims of government “weaponization” – wouldn’t happen.

The fact that this is even on the table is beyond comprehension.

End Citizens United is running a petition to call Congress to reject Blanche’s nomination. You can sign it here.

If last week you had money to burn and were feeling clairvoyant, you could’ve placed a trade on Kalshi, the prediction market site, about whether Sam Altman – the co-founder and CEO of the OpenAI, which is valued at over $800 billion – would say the term “data center” during his approaching interview with CNBC: Squawk. If that wasn’t dystopian enough for you, you can put money on whether President of Cuba Miguel Diaz-Canel will be dispossessed of his office before this August or September; Kalshi users have “invested” over $900,000 on that question, as Cubans are subsiding on an average of a few dollars per day. And that’s nothing compared to the $18 million Kalshi users have on whether and when there’ll be an U.S.-Iran nuclear deal.

It probably won’t come as a surprise that after the Trump Administration retook the reins of the Department of Justice, the agency dropped its inquiries into whether prediction market sites like Kalshi and Polymarket are facilitating illegal gambling. These markets are largely unregulated. And, they’re growing rapidly. So, before our eyes, prediction markets are emerging as yet another force that enables political corruption – with, forgive the pun, too many potential threats to democracy to predict.

For those of you, like me, who haven’t waded a toe into the proliferating prediction markets, here are the basics: In 2019, the website Polymarket launched as a platform where users could place money on the outcome of future events, including political events. For better or worse, many political observers now consider the platform’s wagers a benchmark for whether a campaign is viable. Polymarket’s valuation has been estimated to be $15 billion. Kalshi, launched in 2021, is a similar platform, where you can buy “yes” or “no” positions on future events ranging from whether the movie Moana will be reviewed favorably on Rotten Tomatoes to whether members of Congress will be reelected. This May, Kalshi’s valuation was $22 billion.

So, what’s the problem? If someone wants to put $5,000 on whether Sam Altman will say “data center” during an upcoming TV interview, what’s it to the rest of us? Isn’t this just like other forms of risk-taking like legalized gambling, sports betting, the lottery, or, hey, the stock market?

No, these prediction markets are different. Sure, sports rely on referees’ subjective calls, and FIFA has once again disillusioned us all, but it’s pretty hard for someone to know with near certainty which team is going to win and still turn a hefty profit on an unlikely bet.

In contrast, many prediction markets are highly controllable events. Altman, for example, can decide how to phrase a response to an interviewer’s question. If a public figure knows that a close friend has wagered thousands of dollars on him saying, “data center,” he can throw the term “data center” into his response, even if it takes some word salad. The same principle applies to lots of future events and therefore lots of prediction markets trades.

So, these markets are ripe for insider trading. Elected officials can easily profit from having insider information about all manner of government decisions. They’re already profiting from trading stocks while having inside information. Rep. Rob Bresnahan (PA-8) dumped stocks in Medicaid providers valued at roughly $130,000 while having access to privileged information about the Republicans’ mega-bill that slashed Medicaid spending. But prediction markets create another venue for that kind of blatant corruption.

If that seems far-fetched, consider that campaign staffers told NPR that they’d placed thousands of dollars on bets on their own candidates with insider information. In one instance, a staffer working on a statewide campaign had access to polling data before it was made publicly available. “Myself and others started placing bets before that poll came out,” the staffer explained to NPR. “And then, sure enough as soon as that poll came out, the stock went up and everybody made money.” The staffer said that this was commonplace.

Another wrinkle: Because prediction markets are considered indicators of how a campaign will fare, a sudden surge of money can also distort public opinion about the campaigns’ viability, which can set in motion different types of media attention, donations, and so forth, potentially changing the outcome. Prediction markets can easily end up influencing future events in other ways, too. Potential windfalls can encourage public figures to take specific actions to enrich themselves or people close to them.

Saying “data center” during an interview is one thing. What if Kalshi users have wagered millions of dollars on whether, say, the governor of Ohio will sign off on increased tax breaks for data centers? And what if the governor is being lobbied by their biggest donor, or their son, or their next-door neighbor, who wants to win a million bucks on their latest bet? The prediction market is then a factor in a government official’s decision, with implications for public welfare.

In a different reality, we could dismiss as ridiculous the notion of the president of the United States setting the terms of a nuclear deal with a foreign adversary to help his kids or golfing buddies win millions of dollars. But now, we’ve seen a lot, and honestly it doesn’t seem out of character.

This spring, U.S. Senators Jeff Merkley (OR) and Amy Klobuchar (MN) introduced legislation that would ban the President, Vice President, members of Congress and other public officials from trading event contracts on prediction markets. The goal of the bill is to limit the possibility of insider trading by federal officials. Merkley has previously sponsored legislation to crack down on election gambling, Congressional stock trading, and crypto-currency corruption.

“There shouldn’t be any bets placed on acts of government,” Merkley said. “There are just too many people who know what the strategy is. There should be nothing placed on acts of war, nothing placed on terrorism, and nothing on assassinations, and nothing on elections.”

Prediction markets have the potential to supercharge the problems with Big Money in politics. If watching billionaires and corporations buy off politicians to get their preferred policies enacted was starting to feel a little repetitive, we may soon see billionaires buying off elections so they can win back even larger piles of money from their elections prediction trades. If you’re a billionaire who stands to win tens of millions on a prediction market, spending another few million to flip an election seems like a great return on investment.

Here’s yet another way that the richest people in the country can have outsized influence:

“The most dangerous aspect of the prediction markets is the corruption of our elections,” Merkley said. “We have, under Citizens United, the ability of affluent people or corporations to put unlimited sums in massive smear campaigns at the last minute.” With the advent of prediction markets, the incentives are totally distorted. “The election isn’t about who represents my views or who will take our nation forward. It’s about ‘How do I win this bet?’ That’s a fundamental rot at the core of our democratic republic.” So, if we’re going to address the problems with money in politics, we should address prediction markets, too.

In doing so, the Supreme Court eliminated yet another campaign finance guardrail. The Court’s conservative majority has spent years diminishing campaign finance regulations, most notably in its devastating 2010 Citizens United decision that unleashed the catastrophic levels of spending that has wildly corrupted our political system.

This decision is part of a much broader pattern of the Supreme Court enabling political operatives to do more with fewer rules. The limits on party committees spending and coordinating were important, says Tiffany Muller, president of End Citizens United, because “they helped prevent wealthy donors from using party committees as pass-throughs to buy influence with candidates. Put simply, they prevented corruption.”

“So, if you’re Peter Thiel, this is great,” Elie Mystal, justice correspondent at The Nation, paraphrased on WNYC this week. “You’ve always had to keep your boy, your sock puppet, J.D. Vance at an arm’s length to at least keep up the appearances of legality. Now you don’t have to do that.”

The Roberts Court has a habit of framing money in politics questions in terms of freedom of speech. It’s clear how disingenuous those arguments are. As Muller says of the NRSC ruling, “They call it free speech. But free speech belongs to every American. The ability to spend enormous sums of money to influence elections belongs only to the wealthy few.”

There couldn’t be a worse time for the Supreme Court to unleash even more wild political corruption. This decision comes while partisan political groups are increasingly manipulating what’s left of the rules to hide their donors and mislead the public. There’s a growing trend of super PACs forming just after a Federal Election Commission deadline before an election, so that the PAC can spend unlimited amounts of money without having to publicly disclose its donors before voters cast their ballots. According to a Politico analysis, as of mid-June, super PACs that did not have to reveal their donors had already spent $48 million on House and Senate primaries this cycle. By Politico’s count, that’s double the total at this time in the 2024 campaign cycle and a staggering 10 times the amount of undisclosed political spending in 2018.

One of the industries that stands to benefit from more coordination and less transparency is AI, as companies and executives are now major political players capable of spending astronomical sums. OpenAI is valued at $852 billion; Anthropic at $965 billion. According to End Citizens United, as of late June, AI industry companies and employees have contributed $199 million in this election cycle. That includes a staggering $50 million in AI PACs to influence federal elections.

We can only expect to see more ads funded by AI donors. AI PACs have an incredible $102.1 million in cash on hand to spend during the rest of the 2026 campaign cycle. That’s alarming for many reasons, including that so far AI donors have spent dramatically more supporting Republicans than Democrats.

As Sacha Haworth, executive of The Tech Oversight Project, put it, “A handful of powerful companies, like OpenAI, Meta, Google, Palantir, and Andreessen Horowitz, are hellbent on making sure the public is locked out of the halls of Congress and all 50 statehouses.”

Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United and NRSC that favor megadonors have made the too-cozy relationship between industry donors and potential government officials even more explicit. Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her NRSC v. FEC dissent, that “So the Court ushers back in the same opportunities for quid pro quo corruption that the contribution limits were meant to check.”

It’s always dangerous for politicians to feel beholden to titans of industry but given that we’re in a moment of rapid AI expansion and we urgently need tech new regulatory frameworks that protect just about everything, from the climate to labor to child safety, it’s especially dire that industry groups are turning themselves into political megadonors who can buy off would-be regulators.

And, as we know, that’s not the only way that political operatives are exploiting the giant gaps in our campaign finance laws. Republican donors have simultaneously spent huge sums to influence Democratic primaries by funneling money into super PACs that obscure the fact that they’re led by Republicans trying to pick Democrats opponents they assume they’ll have a better chance of defeating in the general election. Stark examples are Lead Left and Real Change, which have received millions from Republican donors and spent heavily on Democratic primaries.

To illustrate the point: American Prosperity Alliance is a self-described pro-free market political organization aligned with former Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. American Prosperity Alliance funded Conservative Americans PAC, which PAC funded Lead Left, another super PAC, which has reportedly spent at least $2.4 million “promoting” Democratic primary candidates.

And yet, ahead of the midterms, while Republican political operatives are engaging in these duplicitous scams and more, the Supreme Court decided to chip away at yet another campaign finance regulation.

Democrats still have a good chance of taking back Congress in November. This term, the Court has shown yet again that when Democrats are back in power they need to hit the ground running with ambitious plans to show the American public that they’re fighting to end all of this rampant corruption.

Congresswoman McDonald Rivet recently introduced the No Profiting from Public Service Act that focuses on anti-corruption issues and enforces a stock trading ban. You can find out more about her race here.

I wanted to talk to Gaby because she understands the structural problems at the heart of the myriad problems plaguing our country right now – and because she also understands potential solutions. I recently wrote about court reform as possible way forward. Another anecdote could be building power in the states, which is the focus of Gaby’s current work with State Futures.

Meaghan: What should we know about why state-level work is so important?

Gaby: States are in a moment of ascendancy in terms of their power over the issues that control our daily lives. Certainly, it’s hard to tear our eyes away from what this administration is doing, but the truth is that the state-level is where the rubber really hits the road on the issues on the policies that touch us every day.

Conservatives have known this for generations. They have invested generously in infrastructure to support candidates running for state office to incubate regressive ideas. Those ideas then metastasize across states and eventually move up to the national level.

Why are states ascending in terms of power right now? Two big reasons.

First, the federal government is disintegrating in front of our eyes when it comes to protective civil rights, regulatory standards and programs. Everything from clean drinking water standards to voting rights are being eviscerated. So, that makes states increasingly the venue where our rights are decided.

The other big reason is that the Supreme Court is a group of partisan hacks that makes decisions to further political outcomes that advantage the Republican Party and is completely unaligned with civil rights, with the protection of the environment, bodily autonomy rights for women and trans people, and more. The Supreme Court keeps turning these consequential issues back to the states. For example, the Dobbs decision turned whether you can have an abortion legally and safely back to states. So, the states are increasingly the venue where our rights have to be protected.

So, it’s more important than ever for us be organizing and mobilizing state legislators who share our values, who want to protect the environment, who want to protect bodily autonomy, and who want to expand civil rights, expand voting access, make it easier to vote. That’s what we’re doing at State Futures. We organize, we mobilize, we equip those policymakers, put them in community together, and help them collaborate both on policy and on creating visible solidarity against what is happening nationally.

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Meaghan: Many Democrats are concerned about ICE. The federal government has a lot of discretion over immigration enforcement. What are some ways we can push back against ICE on the state and local level?

Gaby: We can push back. The world has been watching what’s happening at Delaney Hall in New Jersey, where folks who’ve been detained by ICE and are being held at a for-profit facility held a hunger strike, a labor strike for weeks, to try to get visibility and improve the conditions at a facility. Last month, while visiting the facility U.S. Senator Andy Kim was pepper-sprayed.

This is an ICE facility operated by Geo Group, which is one of the biggest private prison companies in the United States. Hundreds of detainees participated in the strike, demanding ventilation and medical care.

From my perspective, what’s really important for folks to understand is that states have a lot of authority to regulate businesses and entities and facilities operating within the state. Every state has significant authority to regulate what is happening inside these ICE facilities. The good news is that some states are taking a lot of action.

State Futures recently released an issue brief outlining some of the creative, important bills that state legislatures are introducing and passing to address immigration detention facilities. We’re also tracking about 250 bills across the country in states across the country related to broader immigration and rule of law issues. Everyone can check out our tracker.

At least 12 states have banned 287 (g) agreements, which are formal agreements that delegate federal enforcement authority to state and local cops. Many more states have introduced those bills. States are also working to more closely regulate private detention facilities like Delaney Hall.

One very interesting idea proposed in New Jersey is that legislation could impose a 50% tax on the gross receipts of private immigrant detention facilities like Delaney Hall and redirect those proceeds to an immigrant protection fund for immigration services. Great idea.

States are also establishing rights and protections for people who are held at detention facilities, requiring meaningful language access, access to counsel, phone access. It’s also a really interesting and good strategy for states to think about is applying zoning land use health regulations to these detention facilities.

There are lots of ways to that states have to use their authority to stop these facilities from even being built or being built out, and then when they do exist, force more accountability and higher health and safety standards. They can give more authority to attorneys general and health departments and other state entities to inspect and conduct oversight. There are lots and lots of ways that states can and must use their authority to hold these facilities accountable. In general, there’s a lot of hope and inspiration to be had at the state level.

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Meaghan: We all need hope right now. Can you talk more about any hopeful signs you see on the state level?

Gaby: One of the things that we are really excited about at State Futures is what I call collective state action. What if we applied the applied ideas about collective action at the state level? We can have groups of states come together and create a bigger firewall against what’s happening at the federal level than any individual state could have on its own.

I’ll just mention a couple of ways states can collaborate and pool resources that are very exciting. One is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Essentially this is an interstate compact. It’s an agreement among a group of states to all award their electoral votes to whichever presidential ticket wins the popular vote. And so, it’s designed to ensure that the candidate who receives the most votes nationally is elected president, which, as we know, is not how the electoral college has worked out over several past elections, right? Many states have passed it. We’re inching closer to having enough states pass it that it would go into effect, but it’s an example of an interstate compact.

Another that I’m really a huge fan of is Array RX, which is a group purchasing arrangement for states to pool their vast purchasing power to drive down the cost of prescription drugs. It’s an incredibly successful program. It started in Washington State and Oregon. It’s still administered through those states’ health authorities. The state programs are able to negotiate much lower rates, and the savings for individual people in the program are pretty eyepopping. When Connecticut joined the average cost savings for people in Connecticut who enrolled, for free, was $200 a month per person. When states join together, they have more leveraging power.

The right has known for a very long time that state policy can shift national policy. One of the really important ways to do that is by having many states introduce and pass particular types of bills building the case state by state. Now, of course, the right is trying to do that in ways that we find abhorrent, by stripping away our rights and protections, and all the rest, but that’s another form of collective action, right? We can also use state power to move the country in a certain direction, toward equality, fairness, and hope.

You can hear more about Gaby’s work with State Futures here.

Arianna Jones is the Executive Director of NextGen America. You can learn more about their important work here.

We’ll discuss her history of public service, new legislation, and more.

Click here to join at 2 pm!

See you soon,

-End Citizens United

NextGen is a national youth organization that organizes 18- to 29-year-olds and has registered more than 1.6 million young voters. They’ve been running a deep listening campaign that aims to hear from young people across the country about what matters most to them by asking them open-ended questions in one-on-one text exchanges.

I spoke with NextGen’s Senior Digital Organizing Director Sofia Garduno Araujo, who led the deep listening project, called the Pulse Check campaign, about the results of their recent report on what they learned from contacting over 1 million young people in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. From our conversation, I learned that young people see through cheap gimmicks, they’re deeply engaged in the toughest political questions, and they consider corruption a defining political problem that personally affects them.

Meaghan: I like to start by asking people how they got involved in politics.

Sofia: My identity was politicized long before I was ever called to do political work. I grew up undocumented most of my life. I was a DACA student for a while, and, you know, in 2017 Trump tried to get rid of DACA.

Through organizing around DACA, I started realizing I was able to connect with people, I could get them to join the cause. I started organizing around college campuses. Of course, I wasn’t able to vote, but I realized that I was good at connecting with people and organizing. That helped me quell the feelings of powerlessness and unease that I was dealing with, because through organizing I could find a way to find a voice I otherwise didn’t have, that others didn’t have.

Meaghan: Why is it important to think of young people as a demographic or collective group?

Sofia: A big part of it is just how large the demographic is. At NextGen, we focus on the 18 to 29 age range, which makes up such a large chunk of the voter base. Young voters are a unique demographic because there’s always new people joining every single year. So, that makes it really important to make sure we’re listening to them and keeping up with what’s affecting them.

There’s also the fact that young people have always had collective power. Throughout history, young people tend to be leaders in movements. So, that’s part of why I’ve focused so much on youth organizing within my work, because of how much potential there is engaging young people.

Meaghan: What misconceptions do people have about young people’s engagement in politics?

Sofia: A big misconception is that young people are apathetic. It’s very, very clear to me that the truth is quite literally the opposite. It’s more that young people are overwhelmed and not feeling like they are heard. They see a system that is clearly not set up in their favor, and they don’t know how to get involved.

With our texting team, we give them resources, we give them information and education, and they’re very excited to get involved. What we’re trying to do is lower the barrier to entry to getting involved. It just doesn’t feel to them that people are listening to them, that their government is representing them. So, they’re not apathetic, there’s just so much coming at them that it’s easy to shut down. It’s really about listening and talking with them in a way that resonates with them.

When talking with young people, it really comes down to just trying to talk to them again in the authentic way, more as a friend, like, “I’m here as a resource, whatever you need, whatever questions you have, I can help, but I’m not any better than you.”

Meaghan: NextGen just released a report on what you heard from young people. What stands out to you about the survey results?

Sofia: Since February, we’ve now sent 1.1 million texts to young people trying to ask them open-ended questions, like, “Hey, what issues are affecting your life the most right now?” or “This year has been a lot. How are you feeling?”

We’ve sent texts to Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. We’ve had a really high response rate, which goes back to the idea that young people aren’t apathetic, they’re actually very tuned in.

The overall top issue is the economy. I mean, that’s not really a surprise to anyone. We actually separated our economy-related replies into a few different sections, so one is housing, one is the job market and wages, one is just cost of living, groceries, things like that, and then there’s just general economic concerns. Taken together, economic concerns rank highest.

The second most common response is anti-fascism and democracy. When we’re looking at single issue tags, anti-fascism is definitely the top one. Young people are very worried about rising fascism. They’re seeing the rise of fascism in terms of billionaire influence and corruption in politics on both sides.

Young people are very, very clear on that. Halfway through the campaign, we actually had to add a response about Democratic Party inaction, because across the board, they’re seeing it. What they’re responding to isn’t the party division anymore, it’s the corruption aspect. We saw that in both the economy and democracy responses. For young people, there’s a very clear link between the billionaire oligarchy that we’re seeing, and they’re able to connect it all very clearly.

The third response is foreign policy, and, again, that’s very clear. We actually started this campaign before the war in Iran started. As soon as the war started, we heard about how they’re scared of World War III, they’re scared of being drafted. They also understood how the war was affecting their economic struggles. They were saying things like, “I can’t get to school because I have to drive, and gas prices are astronomical right now.”

It’s also fascinating to see how much young people understand that all these things are linked. We asked them to pick one thing, but in many of our responses, they make a clear connection between all of them. We try to ask people to pick just one tag, but a lot of them are like, “No, it’s everything, it’s all connected. It’s not just one problem, it’s an amalgamation of problems.”

Meaghan: Do you have advice for reaching young voters?

Sofia: We’ve seen that young people can be engaged with texts. We think we’re getting those results because we’re listening, we’re not being transactional. Listening is a huge first step.

I’ll give an example about connecting with people. In 2018, I was a field organizer in a primarily Latino community. The amount of times that I went up to a door and I was talking to someone in Spanish, and someone would tell me, “This is the first time a campaign has ever spoken to me, come to my door, and been able to speak my language, and like have a real conversation with me. I’m going to vote for your candidate just for that alone.” I think we really underestimate how much listening can actually make a difference.

In this texting campaign, we don’t ask people to vote for any candidate after we text with them. We tell them about things they can do related to the issues that they said they cared about, we show them how to contact their representatives, we give them information, but we don’t make it transactional in terms of asking them to do something for a campaign. We’re validating what they’re saying, we’re giving them stats about how many other Americans agree with them, and we’re trying to give them an outlet to do something with the frustration they might be feeling. We say, “We’re here to help you, and you know what’s best for your community.”

Meaghan: I’ve been asking everyone, how are you coping?

Sofia: I mean, it’s tough. One thing that I found a lot of solace in is that I feel like I have a really strong community here. I moved to Chicago about a year ago, and pretty much my whole friend group moved here at the same time. We’ll be able to just come together and talk about how it is affecting us. That’s helped me a lot.

The other thing is I like to go to the park and see the birds. I love birds. And, I actually recently started flying kites, because now I’m in the Windy City, this is the perfect place for kites. I love it, it feels like the best thing in the world. So, if the weather’s nice, I’ll go to the park and fly a kite.

End Citizens United recently published an analysis of members of Congress and their records of blatant conflicts of interest, financial dealings, and self-enrichment schemes. Multiple current and former Republican Senate candidates share a history of leveraging their public office and insider connections for personal gain, often at the expense of American taxpayers.

“A disturbing number of Republican Senate candidates have spent their political careers leveraging their influence, cashing in on their connections, and abusing the public trust for personal gain instead of fighting for their constituents,” said End Citizens United President Tiffany Muller. “Voters expect elected officials to fight for hardworking families, not to cozy up to special interests and then walk through the revolving door to cash in. We’re committed to holding these Revolving Door Republicans accountable for putting themselves and their donors ahead of the people they’re supposed to serve.”

Here are some lowlights from the Top 5 “Revolving Door” Republican Senate Candidates:

Sen. Susan Collins (Maine): During her nearly 30-year tenure in the U.S. Senate, Collins has accepted nearly half a million dollars from Big Pharma and she also has taken pivotal votes that have directly benefited Big Pharma – one of the most powerful, and well-funded corporate lobbies in America.”

In 2025, the private equity billionaire Steve Schwarzman funneled $2 million to reelect Collins and the very next day, she cast a determining vote to greenlight extending tax breaks to owners of private equity firms.

Meanwhile, Collins has protected her own ability to profit. She has opposed bipartisan legislation to ban members of Congress and their spouses from trading individual stocks, even after reporting surfaced that showed her portfolio ranked “eighth among members of Congress for growth” in 2024.

Sen. Dan Sullivan (Alaska): Multi-millionaire Sullivan has gotten even richer while serving in the U.S. Senate. Reporting shows that he has owned $5 million worth of stock in a chemical company, RPM International, that makes products known to cause cancer while sitting on a Senate committee tasked with overseeing that industry; he has repeatedly backed the financial interests of the company. In turn, the chemical company poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into backing his re-election campaign.

Sullivan’s net worth increased significantly as a result of his holdings in the chemical industry. He’s also reportedly made an estimated $2 million trading stocks while a member of Congress – while Alaskans increasingly have trouble making ends meet.

Former Rep. Mike Rogers (Michigan): Rogers is running to represent Michigan in the U.S. Senate after leaving Congress, moving to Florida, and declaring that he was going to pursue “something more lucrative.” Since then, Rogers has engaged in classic revolving door politics and worked for the same companies that he used to regulate in Congress. If elected to the Senate, he’ll then be in a position where he’s supposed to oversee the companies and industries that just lined his pockets.

Former Sen. John Sununu (New Hampshire): Immediately after Sununu lost his 2008 reelection campaign, he went to work for a lobbying firm that represents corporate giants like Pfizer, Gilead, and Merck. While a senator, he sat on a committee that was supposed to be looking into the Wall Street bailout after the Great Financial Crisis. Sununu later joined the board of a financial firm that received $3 billion in the bailout fund – as well as the corporate boards of other businesses that he was tasked with overseeing in the Senate.

Now, Sununu is launching another Senate campaign and his top donors are from Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Oil, and the financial sector. He also owns a stock portfolio with as much as $2 million in those and affiliated industries.

Michael Whatley (North Carolina): Whatley is a longtime career lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry and its affiliated industries. He’s lobbied on the behalf of oil and gas companies and their allies for over a decade. He even launched and helped lead a pro-oil advocacy group that represented utility companies. Then, the lobbyists opposed regulations on fracking, water and air pollution while lobbying for offshore drilling. If he wins his election, Whatley would be in a position to give even more handouts to his utility and fossil fuel connections during a time when everyday Americans’ utility costs are skyrocketing.

Like many other members of Congress who made End Citizens United’s list of politicians who most abuse the revolving door, Whatley has personally enriched himself from the Trump administration’s actions. He has celebrated the U.S. government’s invasion of Venezuela and his Big Oil stock value rose as much as $630,000 in a single weekend.

We’ll discuss his history of public service, updates on his Senate race, and more.

Click here to join live at 11 am!

See you soon,

-End Citizens United

“We’re not treated like people,” a man imprisoned at Delaney Hall told a local journalist recently. “We’re treated like animals.”

Earlier this year, prisoners at Delaney Hall had sent immigration activists an open letter, “Our Cry,” in which they wrote, “We feel vulnerable, in a way, kidnapped or detained without justification. We see with profound helplessness and frustration that the right to due process and legal counsel was violated.” Since then, prisoners have released two more open letters, which recount horrible conditions, including finding worms in their food, being forced into solitary confinement, and being denied medical care.

There are so many things to say about the violence ICE has inflicted on people across the United States–and both inside and outside Delaney Hall. Events are unfolding quickly. For the purpose of this newsletter, I’m going to focus just on the political and financial ties between ICE and GEO Group. The ties between them is a case study in how unchecked political corruption is enabling the worst manifestations of state violence.

In the simplest possible terms, GEO Group helped President Trump and Republicans in Congress get elected. In turn, Trump and Republicans in Congress have helped GEO Group profit from ICE rounding up and imprisoning immigrants. And now GEO Group and Trump are helping each other maintain their positions of power by fulfilling their symbiotic roles to inflict authoritarian violence on communities across the country.

Before returning to Delaney Hall, I want to lay out several important pieces of information to keep in mind as we watch footage of ICE being violent toward people protesting outside that facility or any other one operated in collaboration by the Department of Homeland Security and GEO Group.

Major ways GEO Group helped the GOP gain power:

1. Ahead of the 2024 election, GEO Group was the first corporation whose PAC maxed out its donations to President Trump’s campaign. Then, the company made another $500,000 donation via a subsidiary to Make America Great Again PAC.

2. GEO Group’s CEO, George Zoley, has also made significant contributions to President Trump’s campaign and other Republican causes.

Major ways the GOP is helping GEO Group profit:

3. In 2025, Congressional Republicans passed their megabill that allotted more than $70 billion for ICE.

4. Also in 2025, the Trump administration signed a $1 billion contract with GEO Group to convert Delaney Hall into an ICE prison.

5. The Trump administration has taken numerous actions– including setting deportation quotas, effectively curtailing the right to asylum for many, firing en masse immigration judges considered sympathetic to immigrant rights, arresting immigrants for political speech, and so forth– that help GEO Group keep its prisons stocked full of people.

6. This year, President Trump chose as the new acting Director of ICE former GEO Group executive, David Venurella, who worked for the company for over a decade.

7. GEO Group could make even more money this year. In just the first quarter of 2026, the company brought in $2.6 billion in revenue, a significant increase from last year.

8. CEO Zoley has said that he supports GEO Group facilities being federally owned because that helps the company avoid legal liability in potential lawsuits related to “oversight of medical services, food services, general cleanliness.”

The fact that the GEO Group and the Trump Administration are so financially tied gives a whole new dimension to the substandard conditions have been reported at multiple ICE detention centers, including GEO Group’s center in Dilley, Texas, where people being held don’t have access to clean water, and bright lights are kept on twenty-four hours a day, among other horrible conditions. According to a CNN investigation, almost fifty people have died in ICE detention so far during Trump’s second term.

Last month, 300 people being imprisoned in Delaney Hall went on a work and hunger strike to protest what they described as unsafe conditions and inhumane treatment. On the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, roughly five months after Martin was first detained, Gabriela Soto, Martin’s wife, held a small press conference outside the facility calling attention to the strike.

Last week, ICE agents shoved, beat, and pepper-sprayed people protesting outside the building. ICE pepper-sprayed, journalists, volunteers, U.S. Senator Andy Kim (NJ), and many others. The scenes we’ve all witnessed over the last couple weeks are an escalation, but not anything new. Last year, before Delaney Hall reopened as an ICE detention center, Department of Homeland Security agents arrested Newark Mayor Ras Baraka while he took part in a demonstration against its conversion into an ICE facility.

Despite ICE agents and then New Jersey state police beating protesters, people kept showing up to protest in solidarity with the striking immigrants inside Delaney. This week, the state of New Jersey filed a new lawsuit against GEO Group that could force the closure of Delaney Hall. It’s tough to consider something like this a victory, because the entire situation is horrible in many ways, and the legal push is just a start, but at least New Jersey is using its power to push back. As we watch GEO Group respond and try to keep Delaney Hall open, we have to remember that although, yes, when it comes to denying people like Martin Soto their freedom, the cruelty is the point, but the goal is also to make prison companies like GEO Group a lot of money.

The Justices handed down the decision via the Court’s so-called “shadow docket,” an emergency order issued without the opportunity for arguments in court. Legal experts called the situation “a constitutional crisis.”

At the time, Rhiannon Hamam wrote for the legal outlet Balls and Strikes: “Unless and until Senate Democrats get serious about reforming both the Trump-packed Supreme Court and also the Trump-packed lower courts, SB8 is just a preview of the many dangerous, fascistic attacks on constitutional rights to come.” In retrospect, yes, that was true.

Since overturning Roe, the Supreme Court has thrown out other major precedents to dismantle many other rights and protections. Among other dangerous decisions, the Court’s supermajority has limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases, gutted the Voting Rights Act, and ruled that President Trump has immunity from criminal prosecution. In several decisions, including those related to gerrymandering, the justices have enabled the Republican Party – which, no coincidence, installed the super-majority of conservative justices – to consolidate and retain structural political power.

Given that the judiciary is increasingly just a gear in the Republican political machine, calling for Supreme Court reform is no longer considered fringe. Especially since the Court’s devastating decision in Callais, which will radically diminish Black Americans’ voting rights and collective power, more Democrats have issued full-throated calls for changing the system. “We need Supreme Court reform,” Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) recently said. “Everything should be on the table.”

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So, what are some options on the table? Here are a few reform ideas under consideration:

Increase the number of Justices. Congress could change the number of Supreme Court justices without changing the Constitution. Many reform advocates propose expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court to dilute the influence of the current conservative supermajority that has shown almost unwavering loyalty to President Trump and the rightwing thinktanks and billionaires that enabled their lifetime tenures.

Proponents of expanding the Court argue that unless more justices are added soon, there is effectively no check on MAGA donors and politicians who have seized levers of power across the government and are pushing openly authoritarian ideas and policies at an alarming rate. The thinking is simple: Our country is in a desperate situation, so we need major, immediate changes to correct the system to preserve our basic rights, including the rights to vote, protest, and speak freely.

One argument against expanding the Supreme Court is that such reforms would make the High Court an openly partisan body – and that’s not what it’s supposed to be. The problem, of course, is that the Supreme Court is already deeply corrupted by partisan forces and huge amounts of political spending (including the tens of millions Leonard Leo’s network spent to remake the federal judiciary) and pretending that’s not true won’t change reality.

Some argue that this reform isn’t a long-term solution on its own, because if Congress adds more justices when Democrats are in power, Republicans will just do the same when they have their chance. So, expanding the Supreme Court would also need to be accompanied by other reforms.

Enact Term Limits. Congress could enact term limits for justices. Term limits would reduce the vast power that just nine individuals hold over the roughly 342 million people who live in the United States. Many reform advocates propose 18-year terms.

Lifetime appointments are a major reason that the Court is so imbalanced and authoritarianism friendly. At the risk of stating the obvious, under the current system of lifetime Supreme Court appointments, our constitutional rights rely on the health of a few individuals and the mostly random chance of whether they will pass away while a Democrat or Republican is president – if they don’t voluntarily retire.

“No other major democracy in the world provides life tenure for high court judges who hear constitutional cases,” Miriam Rosenbaum and Emily Whitehead of the Brennan Center for Justice write in a recently published paper on fixing the Supreme Court. “Nobody should hold that much power for so long. This reflects a core element of democratic accountability, a lesson taught by George Washington when he established the two-term tradition for presidents.”

Critics of this idea say that changes to the structure could diminish the Court’s credibility. But what credibility? A majority of Americans are skeptical of the Court, and with good reason.

The only argument against Court term limits that makes sense to me is that creating a system wherein Justices will likely take other jobs after leaving the Supreme Court could make them even more corruptible. Like many members of Congress, justices could hand out favorable outcomes to say a financial institution or pharmaceutical company, hoping to receive a cushy job in exchange. The possibility of a revolving door between the courts and industry – or think tanks, etc. – just provides more reason to pass meaningful ethics reform alongside any structural changes to the Court.

Establish Ethics Reforms. Justice Clarence Thomas – the longest-serving current Supreme Court justice – has received millions of dollars-worth of gifts from political donors, according to incredible reporting from ProPublica. One of Thomas’s main benefactors, Harlon Crow, is also a major donor to Republican causes. If you need a refresher, I recommend reading the whole report, which on its own makes a strong case for the urgent need for Supreme Court ethics reform.

Despite having lifetime appointments and extraordinary power to shape every facet of American life, Supreme Court Justices are held to very few ethics requirements. They aren’t even held to the same ethics requirements as federal judges. The Supreme Court only adopted its first ethics requirement in 2023, and that is only a series of stated rules and principles, and none of them are enforceable. There’s no mechanism to enforce the rules if a Justice is accused of breaking them. “This code is more loophole than law,” write The Brennan Center’s Rosenbaum and Whitehead.

There are lots of ways ethics reform could happen. Congress could force Supreme Court Justices to be accountable to the public by being more transparent, including by requiring more financial disclosure and television cameras in the courtroom. Congress could also reform its own role by requiring a Supreme Court vacancy to be filled within a specified span of time, eliminating the possibility of a repeat of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocking the confirmation of Merrick Garland. And justices could have tighter requirements dictating when they need to recuse themselves from cases.

So, what do you think? Expand the court, enact term limits, pass ethics reform, or all three?