Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct Sen. Lisa Murkowski's support for voting rights legislation.
The new year brought with it a change in leadership at one of nation’s leading cross-partisan political reform organizations, as RepresentUs announced Tuesday that co-founder Joshua Graham Lynn has been elevated to CEO.
Ten years ago, Lynn and Josh Silver co-founded RepresentUs to advocate for systemic changes to the American political system. Silver had been serving as CEO, but is stepping aside to serve as executive chairman.
Lynn and his peers across the democracy reform movement have an ambitious agenda focused on voting rights, gerrymandering, election integrity and campaign finance.
“In 2012, in the wake of Citizens United, we — Josh Silver and I — recognized the urgent need to start addressing systemic reform ... and we recognized the need for an organization not focused on Democrats or Republicans but focused on bridging the ideological divide,” said Lynn.
In the ensuing decade, RepresentUs has been among the leading advocates for causes like open primaries, ranked-choice voting and ethics changes, claiming success in more than 125 instances around the country.
Lynn, who had served as president of the organization, has a background in marketing and creative services. RepresentUs, which counts numerous big-name actors and musicians among its cultural advisers, has gained national exposure through its short films and ads featuring the likes of Jennifer Lawrence, Omar Epps, Ed Helms, Michael Douglas, Mark Ruffalo, and Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom.
RepresentUs and other organizations working on election and voting reform are currently supporting efforts to push a pair of bills, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, through the Senate. The bills have been passed by the House of Representatives but have been blocked by Republican filibusters in the Senate.
“This fight is not over. There’s plenty of opportunity,” said Lynn. “We need to keep the volume turned up and keep being strategic. If we continue to be smart and use the right messengers for the right constituents — the right members of the Senate — we can move forward.”
Lynn likened the fight for federal voting reforms to “The Sixth Sense.. He believes that once the bills pass, it will be obvious that they were needed.
“Once you see it, you go, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I didn't see it before,’” he said.
The RepresentUs leadership believes that the transition will go smoothly, thanks to the partnership between Silver and Lynn.
“Joshua Lynn has been an essential element in nearly every facet of RepresentUs’ success and has a smart vision for the future. Silver will be continuing to advise as Executive Chairman to ensure a smooth transition,” the pair wrote in a letter.
Lynn further explained how their collaboration has been key to the organization’s success: “Josh and I have been working very closely in lockstep for the last 10 years. It’s been a great partnership. We challenge each other but it’s been very aligned.”
Lynn and the team have their work cut out for them going forward. There is an urgent need to build on their past nonpartisan victories, he said, because “what we saw in 2020 was not the end but the top of a slippery slope toward the fall of democracy.”
“We basically need to build a nonpartisan countervailing force to those who are countermanding democracy, the followers of the Big Lie,” he said.
To that end, Represent Us will look to fill strategic gaps and boost advocacy efforts where they are needed most. He pointed to the work RepresentUs has done in West Virginia to influence Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin.
Manchin had opposed the Democrats’ first wide-ranging election reform bill, the For the People Act, but worked with colleagues to draft a somewhat more limited version that became the Freedom to Vote Act that he hoped would attract Republican support, but so far none have signed on. Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski is the only Republican senator to provide support for the John Lewis voting rights bill.
But Manchin and Democrat Kyrsten Sinema remain opposed to changing the filibuster rules to enable passage of the bill.
Lynn noted that ReprentUs made a heavy push in West Virginia around the Freedom to Vote Act, organizing communities of faith and military veterans, among others, to urge Manchin forward. He has high hopes that similar work — building what he says will “effectively be the largests grassroots, nonpartisan pro-democracy movement in the country” — will form the roadmap for success in 2022, 2024 and beyond.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.