Fitch is the president and CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation and a former congressional staffer.
The Congressional Management Foundation today announced the winners of the seventh annual Democracy Awards, CMF’s program recognizing non-legislative achievement and performance in congressional offices and by members of Congress. Two members of Congress, one Democrat and one Republican, are recognized in four categories related to their work in Congress.
Americans usually only hear about Congress when something goes wrong. The Democracy Awards shines a light on Congress when it does something right. These members of Congress and their staff deserve recognition for their work to improve accountability in government, modernize their work environments and serve their constituents.
In the Constituent Service category, Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.) was recognized for mandating a 24-hour response time to constituent requests for assistance. The office has separate intake and casework manuals and utilizes a shared intake drive that is checked by five staff members throughout the day to expedite processing. The Democratic winner, Rep. Lucy McBath, the first member of Congress from Georgia to win an award, was cited for having a “living casework intake guide” that’s altered quarterly as federal agency processes change and constituent needs fluctuate. The guide includes every step of creating a new case and all questions that need to be asked at intake for each agency with which the office interacts.
Bilirakis also won in the Constituent Accountability and Accessibility category. CMF staff noted the congressman’s vote record is displayed on his website and the rationale for each vote is explained in his weekly newsletter. Also, Bilirakis held approximately 100 in-person or tele-town hall meetings in 2023. The Democrat winner, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), was recognized for offering diverse language options for constituents to understand services available, and providing child care services at town hall meetings so single parents can attend.
The Republican winner for the Workplace Environment category (known as the “Life in Congress” award), Rep. Don Bacon (Neb.), was cited for his creative workplace policies, including offering a flexible telework policy, compensatory time off, and three office- sanctioned fitness breaks per week. The Bacon office also has the lowest staff turnover in the Nebraska delegation. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (Ill.), the Democratic winner, was noted for a year-long staff mentorship program, which includes matching senior staff with new hires for confidential advice and guidance as well as providing formal training and monthly group check-ins.
For the fourth category, Innovation and Modernization, Rep. Don Davis (N.C.) was the Democratic winner and the only first-term member of Congress to win an award. Davis’ office has increased feedback from meeting with constituents by offering participants a QR code to link directly to feedback forms. Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), the Republican winner, was noted for a novel Senior Fellows Program designed to meet the specific needs of older adults. This program offers a specially tailored orientation and extensive training to accommodate two longer service, six-month terms per year.
The process for selecting the winners was conducted over a six-month period in 2024. House and Senate personal offices self-nominated in early 2024 using an online questionnaire. CMF then followed up with offices to conduct interviews and assess each office's adherence to the established criteria, using a detailed checklist to determine a list of finalists who would advance to the selection committee phase. In June, the committee, composed of former congressional staffers and former members of Congress, selected two winners (one Democrat and one Republican) for each category using the nomination forms, interview notes and supporting material provided by the office.
The founding partner for the Democracy Awards is the Bridge Alliance, which provided a generous grant to launch the program. Bridge Alliance is a diverse coalition of more than 90 organizations committed to revitalizing democratic practice in America. (The Bridge Alliance publishes The Fulcrum.)
The ceremony honoring all finalists and winners will be held on Sept 26.
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.