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Clarity Is Power: The Three Pillars That Keep the People in Charge
Mar 30, 2026
American democracy does not weaken all at once. It falters when citizens lose clarity about how power is being used in their name. Abraham Lincoln warned that “public sentiment is everything… without it, nothing can succeed.” When people understand what their leaders are doing, they can hold them accountable.
But when confusion takes hold, power shifts quietly, and the public’s ability to act begins to erode. Clarity enables citizens to participate fully in democratic life and shape a government that responds to them. Confusion is not harmless; it erodes the safeguards, public awareness, and civic action that make self‑government possible. Clarity strengthens all three pillars at once — it protects our constitutional safeguards, sharpens public awareness, and fuels civic action.
Clarity is more than an ideal; it is the condition that keeps the public in charge. Without it, citizens cannot see how power is being used or recognize when leaders are overstepping.
Our constitutional system rests on the belief that the people are not bystanders to government—they are its authors, its guardians, and its ultimate check. Maintaining that role requires strengthening three pillars that keep the public in charge: constitutional safeguards, public awareness, and civic action.
America’s democracy is faltering in real time. The most troubling threats to its stability are no longer primarily external—they are internal. Concentrated presidential power, a largely silent Congress, election interference within our political system, and structural weaknesses in our institutions are converging. Issues once considered external pressures—international conflicts and geopolitical distractions—now amplify domestic decay rather than simply challenge it from abroad. Plans to reshape the federal government, such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, have quietly entered the national conversation.
Together, these forces erode democratic accountability and undermine the public’s voice. This moment is not only a crisis for American institutions; it is a test of citizens’ ability to defend democracy itself. Meeting that test requires clarity—organizing facts, interpreting risks, and communicating them honestly. Clarity gives citizens the power to navigate today’s chaotic headlines — to separate noise from consequence, distraction from danger, and spectacle from the decisions that shape their lives.
Institutional safeguards are the constitutional and legal protections that prevent government power from being abused. They include freedoms of speech, religion, and the press; the right to a fair trial; and protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. These safeguards protect the public by preventing any leader from silencing dissent, manipulating institutions, or concentrating power beyond constitutional limits.
The framers understood human nature—its ambition and its tendency toward overreach. They designed a system in which no single person or branch could dominate. Congress makes the laws, the president executes them, and the courts interpret them. Checks and balances give each branch the tools to restrain the others. Additional protections—including civil service safeguards and transparency laws—have developed over time to reinforce this design.
When safeguards weaken, the public loses the protections that allow people to speak, worship, publish, assemble, and challenge government actions. When these protections erode in practice, the effects become visible in public life. Threats to religious freedom, pressure on journalists, and harm against peaceful demonstrators all signal that the constitutional guardrails protecting the public’s voice are under strain.
Safeguards protect the people’s ability to act, but they only function when citizens can see how power is being used.
Public awareness is the collective understanding citizens have about how government works, what decisions are being made, and why they matter. It relies on transparent information, a free press, and the ability to evaluate government conduct. Public awareness ensures that citizens can recognize abuses of power and withhold consent when leaders overstep.
At its core, public awareness enables informed consent. Without it, citizens cannot meaningfully participate in self-government. The framers protected a free press, open debate, and the right to petition the government because citizens must understand what their leaders are doing to judge whether those actions align with constitutional principles.
Public awareness is most vulnerable when the flow of information is distorted—when reporting is suppressed, journalists face intimidation, or misinformation spreads. When transparency declines, citizens cannot see how power is being used or abused, making informed judgment difficult.
Understanding proposals such as Project 2025 is a matter of civic literacy. A democracy cannot defend what it does not understand. When major governing plans are treated as abstractions rather than concrete policy agendas, the public loses the ability to evaluate what is being done in its name.
Awareness, however, is only the beginning. Once people understand how power is being used, they must be able to act on that understanding. That is where civic action becomes indispensable.
Civic action is the people’s power made visible. It includes voting, participating in peaceful protests, staying informed, and engaging in public forums. It also includes quieter forms of engagement—community involvement, service, and collective problem solving—that strengthen democratic life beyond partisan politics. Civic action is how the public exercises sovereignty between elections. The Constitution begins with “We the People” because the people themselves are the ultimate check on government.
When civic action weakens—when people are discouraged from voting, when participation is dismissed, or when protest is suppressed—the public loses its most direct means of exercising power.
I did not begin with clarity; I began with confusion — the kind that unsettles your footing and obscures what is at stake. But confusion is not neutral. It is the condition in which power shifts quietly, without the people’s consent. As I learned more about the scope and implications of Project 2025, fear gave way to clarity.
Staying in charge will require a bipartisan commitment to democratic principles. Americans must understand the stakes and recognize when leaders are not acting in the public’s best interest. Citizens must rely on the Constitution’s protections and institutional guardrails to prevent the republic from faltering.
The three pillars—constitutional safeguards, public awareness, and civic action—can keep the public in charge, but only if citizens actively defend them. Americans must understand the separation of powers to prevent any president from becoming too powerful. They must expect each branch of government to exercise its responsibility to check the others. Protecting these structures means defending constitutional rights, staying informed, and participating in civic life.
Elections remain the public’s most direct form of accountability. Voting is power, and citizens must use it in every election—local, state, and national. When leaders support policies that weaken democratic safeguards, concentrate power, or suppress civic participation, voters have the authority to replace them.
Even the strongest pillars cannot stand alone. Clarity is power. To remain in charge of the republic, Americans must defend constitutional safeguards by demanding transparency, accountability, and adherence to the rule of law. Citizens must strengthen civic action by participating beyond election day.
The Constitution places power in the hands of the people—not in any plan, party, or president. Democracy survives only when the public understands what is being done in its name — and insists on its right to be heard. Being heard is only the beginning; in a healthy democracy, leaders must respond with action that reflects the public’s needs rather than ignore them while conditions worsen.
Carolyn Goode is a retired educational leader and a national advocate for ethical leadership, civic literacy, and government accountability. She writes about democratic principles, institutional integrity, and the responsibilities of citizenship in a constitutional republic.
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CONNECT for Health Act of 2025
Mar 30, 2026
How does a bill with no enemies fail to move? That question should trouble anyone who cares about Medicare, about rural health care, and about whether Congress can still do straightforward things.
In plain terms, the CONNECT Act would permanently end the outdated rule that limits Medicare telehealth to patients in rural areas who travel to an approved facility. It would make the patient's home a covered site of care. It would protect audio-only services, critical for seniors without broadband or smartphones, especially for behavioral health. It would ensure that Federally Qualified Health Centers can be reimbursed for telehealth, and it would lock in the pandemic-era flexibilities that Congress has been extending on a temporary basis since 2020. In short, it would turn five years of emergency workarounds into permanent, accountable policy.
The real obstacles have nothing to do with evidence or ideology. The first is cost scoring. The Congressional Budget Office has not yet scored the 2025 version of the bill, but projections typically show increased Medicare spending, perhaps $200 or more per beneficiary per year, because patients who would not have sought in-person care now access services remotely. That projected increase frightens budget hawks in both parties, regardless of whether those members have cosponsored the bill. Until a CBO score exists, no financing solution can be designed, and without one, the Senate Finance Committee has little reason to schedule a markup.
The second obstacle is structural. The CONNECT Act sits in three committees simultaneously: the Senate Finance, House Energy and Commerce, and House Ways and Means. No single committee chair owns it. That fragmentation creates a coordination problem that no amount of lobbying has solved, despite the healthcare sector spending a record $867.5 million on federal lobbying in 2025. On top of that, each short-term extension of telehealth flexibilities reduces the political urgency for permanent reform. The most recent extension, through the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2026, pushed the deadline to December 31, 2027, giving every member of Congress permission to wait another 21 months. The pattern is familiar: extend, delay, repeat.
Pennsylvania illustrates what is at stake when Congress delays. In 2024, the Commonwealth passed Act 42, a strong telehealth parity law that requires private insurers and Medicaid managed care organizations to cover telehealth at the same standard as in-person care. It passed the state Senate 49 to 1. But Act 42 has a fundamental limitation: it does not — and cannot — cover Medicare. Pennsylvania has roughly 2.8 million Medicare beneficiaries, and not one of them is protected by the state's own telehealth law. Meanwhile, the state faces a projected shortage of more than 6,300 mental health professionals by 2026. For rural seniors in Pennsylvania, telehealth is not a convenience; for many, particularly those relying on audio-only phone calls for behavioral health visits, it is the only realistic way to see a provider. Without permanent
Medicare telehealth coverage, that lifeline, depends on whether Congress remembers to renew it every couple of years.
The stakes go beyond individual patients. In late 2025, Governor Shapiro's administration secured $193 million from CMS as the first tranche of Pennsylvania's Rural Health Transformation Plan, a program designed to build broadband-connected telehealth infrastructure across rural hospitals and clinics, expand remote psychiatric consultations, and create maternal health telehealth hubs. Those investments are built on an assumption: that Medicare will reimburse the telehealth services delivered from those new sites. If Congress does not pass the CONNECT Act, a significant portion of that $193 million will be effectively stranded, and infrastructure built for a reimbursement framework may never be delivered. Pennsylvania is not the only state in this position, but it is a vivid example of how federal inaction can undermine state investment.
The CONNECT Act's problem is not the evidence; rather, the clinical data on telehealth equivalency are mature and broadly accepted. It is not an ideology. The bill has genuine bipartisan support that crosses every conventional political line. The problem is process and path: an unscored bill, fragmented committee jurisdiction, and a Congress that finds it easier to extend than to reform. None of these are reasons to let 2.8 million Pennsylvanians, and tens of millions of Medicare beneficiaries nationally, live with permanent uncertainty about whether their telehealth access will survive the next appropriations cycle. Congress, particularly Pennsylvania's delegation, should push the CONNECT Act to markup and vote well before the December 2027 cliff. The votes are there. The evidence is there. What is missing is the will to use them.
Akshaya Sahasra Ganji is a student at Penn State.
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Demonstrators protest Department of Homeland Security assigning ICE agents to work alongside TSA agents at O'Hare International Airport on March 27, 2026 in Chicago, Illinois. The travel disruptions continue as hundreds of TSA agents quit or work without pay during a partial government shutdown. U.S. President Donald Trump said ICE agents will be deployed to U.S. airports on Monday, with border czar Tom Homan in charge of the effort.
(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
DHS Shutdown Becomes Democrats’ Leverage to Curb ICE Tactics after Minnesota Deaths
Mar 28, 2026
WASHINGTON – For more than a month, Democrats have refused to fund the Department of Homeland Security while demanding that the agency limit Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in ten specific ways after federal agents killed two people during federal immigration operations in Minnesota in January.
“We will not continue to allow what we’re seeing on the streets. Thousands of Americans, of immigrants, of our neighbors from Chicago to Minneapolis are saying ‘enough is enough,’” said Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill.
Democrats’ push for immigration enforcement reform has fueled a funding standoff on Capitol Hill that triggered a partial shutdown of DHS in mid-February after lawmakers failed to reach a funding agreement. The shutdown followed their dispute over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, including the January deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
Amid the backlash, President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of 700 federal agents from Minnesota and sent border czar Tom Homan to lead immigration enforcement, who later announced the wind down of the operation, but also stressed support for Trump’s goal of widespread deportation of undocumented immigrants.
“We are not surrendering the President’s mission on a mass deportation operation. If you are in the country illegally, if we find you, we’ll deport you,” Homan said at a press conference in Minneapolis last month.
On Capitol Hill, the budget standoff raised a broader question about whether Democrats can realistically use the DHS funding fight to force changes to federal immigration enforcement while Republicans control Congress.
Democratic leaders have made 10 demands in the DHS funding bill to restrict ICE officers’ aggressive tactics as a condition for funding Homeland Security. The demands include removing face coverings, identifying themselves during operations, and less aggressive force standards.
“They have the leverage to withhold the funding, so the issue is what do you do with it?”
Georgetown Law School supervising attorney Sophia Genovese told Medill News Service.
Genovese pointed to the shutdown in the fall when Republicans entered the negotiations expecting Democrats to eventually concede, and Democrats ultimately agreed to a deal without securing the policy changes they had demanded.
She said her concern is that if Republicans hold out long enough again, public attention could fade and Democrats could face similar pressure to fold.
“The public strongly supports this. This is an issue that’s going to keep coming up,” Genovese said. “But the fear is if they’re going to capitulate and fold and continue to allow this crisis to occur again.”
In recent months, Democrats have also introduced a series of bills to advance their push for ICE accountability.
At a news conference in February, Senator Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Reps. Andrea Salinas, D-Ore. and Derek Tran, D-Calif., introduced the “ICE and CBP Constitutional Accountability Act”, which would allow individuals to seek civil damages if U.S. Customs and Border Protection or ICE officers violate their rights.
Rep. Salinas criticized Trump’s 2025 budget bill that awarded more than $170 billion towards border and interior enforcement, and said the legislation would check ICE and CBP by targeting funds from the 2025 budget bill and using those funds to compensate victims.
“Without accountability, there are no consequences. And without consequences, they will keep violating the Constitution,” Salinas said.
That same month, Rep. Ramirez introduced the “Melt ICE Act”, a bill that would end funding for immigration detention and enforcement under DHS and redirect the money to community services. She said continued funding for DHS fuels human suffering and called for abolishing ICE.
“It must be dismantled piece by piece, and we need something new, a system that actually honors our rights, a system based on dignity, humanity,” Ramirez said.
Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said he hopes Democrats can secure significant reforms to ICE's operations, but he is skeptical that Trump will support meaningful change and would instead veto the bills.
“He’s had a very bad policy. He’s the person who appointed Noem during the rampage in Minneapolis, and he’s really politicized the whole issue so I don’t think he has confidence in reasonable reform,” Welch told Medill News Service. “ICE should be subject to all of the same standards in training, engagement, and warrants that apply to police enforcement in every community across the country.”
Genovese said the proposed legislation falls into several categories, including bills aimed at shrinking the immigration enforcement system and reducing deportations, measures that seek to reform agents’ conduct without limiting enforcement, and others she said would have little practical impact.
“Are all of these bills feeding into an overall reduction of the Department of Homeland Security’s enforcement apparatus, or are these pieces of legislation just simple appeasements for the public? And so that’s something the Democrats need to think critically about,” Genovese said.
Genovese argued that even some Republicans are beginning to recognize the need for limits on immigration enforcement.
“They are disappointed with the immigration enforcement actions they are seeing,” Genovese said. “Even if not every single bill passes, I think Democrats have a tremendous opportunity to get some of these bills passed.”
Indeed, in March, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem faced two days of sharp questioning from Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary Committees over her leadership and the administration’s immigration crackdown.
“What we’ve seen is innocent people getting detained that turn out are American citizens,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said heatedly to Noem. “We’re beginning to get the American people to think that deporting people is wrong. It’s the exact opposite. The way you’re going about deporting them is wrong.”
Soon after the hearing, Trump fired Noem as homeland security secretary and nominated Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., as her replacement.
Rep. Ramirez told Medill News Service that both parties must ask whether they are standing up for their constituents, the rule of law, and the Constitution, and to take action without making excuses or delaying the work.
“Are they going to continue to make excuses and not have a spine and allow Donald Trump to continue to terrorize their communities? So I think it's really important that right now, we're building the case to be able to actually ‘melt ICE’,” Ramirez said.
Gloria Ngwa is a Journalism and Psychology Student at Northwestern University.
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U.S. President Donald Trump signs a bipartisan bill to stop the flow of opioids into the United States in the Oval Office of the White House on January 10, 2018 in Washington, DC
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Two Bills to Become Law; Lots of Ongoing Work
Mar 25, 2026
Two Bills to Become Law
These two bills have passed both the Senate and the House and now go to the President for signing, or, if he remembers his empty threat from the week before last, go to the President to sit for 10 days excluding Sundays at which time they will become law anyway.
- S. 1884: Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2025, which will prohibit certain non-merits-based defenses against returning relevant artwork, passed the House by voice vote so no recorded vote exists.
- S. 3971: Small Business Innovation and Economic Security Act, which will extend some small business related programs, passed 345-41.
Recorded Votes
These bills have only passed the House, so they are not going to become law anytime soon.
- H.R. 4294: MAWS Act of 2026, which would direct the Secretary of Commerce to establish a pilot program with respect to the sale of blue catfish caught within the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, passed 320-66.
- H.R. 1958: Deporting Fraudsters Act of 2026, which would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to clarify that aliens who have been convicted of defrauding the United States Government or the unlawful receipt of public benefits are inadmissible and deportable even though existing law covers this category of crime in nearly every case, passed 231-186.
- H.R. 4638: Federal Working Animal Protection Act, which would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to provide that an alien who has been convicted of harming animals used in law enforcement is inadmissible and deportable even though existing law covers this issue, passed 228-190.
- H.R. 556: Protecting Access for Hunters and Anglers Act, which would prohibit the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture from prohibiting the use of lead ammunition or tackle on certain Federal land or water under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture, passed 215-202.
Legislative Appropriations Recap from the First Branch Forecast
Our colleagues at the First Branch Forecast have been tracking the legislative appropriations process so you don't have to: Recap.
The bottom line is that the legislative branch needs vastly more appropriations than it's likely to give itself and the damage to the functionality of legislative branch will continue to accrue, possibly to a breaking point.
Legislator Updates
- Wall Street Journal report on the record number of members leaving Congress.
- NOTUS report on an AI company co-owned by Rep. Swalwell (D-CA14).
- NOTUS report on Congressional wealth.
Continuing Business
- The House Oversight Committee has formally subpoenaed Attorney General Pam Bondi for a closed session on Jeffrey Epstein.
- The House received a classified briefing on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in advance of a vote next month to renew Section 702.
- DHS remains shut down as neither party has moved from its demands of the other.
Two Bills to Become Law; Lots of Ongoing Work was originally published by GovTrack and is republished with permission.
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