Flynn is the president of Common Cause, one of the nation's oldest democracy reform advocacy organizations.
President Biden speaks frequently about democracy. He mentioned it 11 times in his inaugural address. But words must be matched with collective leadership. As he said in that speech, “we will lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example.”
The United States will put this to the test when the Biden administration convenes a Summit for Democracy this week with representatives from more than 100 nations. The summit will “set an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal around the world,” according to the president. It will launch a “year of action” to “make democracies more responsive and resilient.”
It comes at a precarious time for U.S. democracy. After voters showed up in record numbers in 2020, state legislatures in 19 states passed 33 laws to make it harder to vote. Many of these laws disproportionately affect voters of color, young voters and others whose voices are silenced.
The assault on free and fair elections extends beyond bad laws. Disciples of the former president’s Big Lie have focused efforts on installing loyalists to local election boards. One in three election officials feel unsafe at work and face a barrage of violent threats for doing their job. Partisan legislators are gerrymandering districts to silence voters and subvert the bedrock principle of “one person one vote.”
The summit could be a hopeful end to a year that began with a racist mob of insurrectionists storming Congress to attack the peaceful transfer of power. The events of Jan. 6 interrupted two centuries of this practice in a democracy that survived the Civil War, two world wars, the Depression and many other hardships.
The specter of election sabotage is dangerous. The world took notice. Last month, an international think tank placed the United States on its list of “ backsliding democracies ” for the first time.
Earlier this year, Biden said that “we are in the midst of a fundamental debate about the future and direction of our world, between those who argue that ... autocracy is the best way forward and those who understand that democracy is essential to meeting these challenges.” Hence the announcement of the summit as a way to “demonstrate that democracies can deliver by improving the lives of their own people.”
Democracies must be responsive to the people, who hold the ultimate power. But the undue influence of money in politics, structural racism, corruption and voter suppression can poison the well.
Congress has the power to strengthen our democracy with legislation. The House of Representatives — the chamber closest to the People — did its part on at least three occasions this year. It passed the For the People Act to protect and expand the freedom to vote with fair national standards, break the grip of big money in politics, end gerrymandering, and bolster ethical standards in government. It passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to repair and strengthen the Voting Rights Act and protect against racial discrimination in voting. And it passed the Washington, D.C. Admission Act to grant statehood to the people of our nation’s capital.
These bills (with the Freedom to Vote Act, a compromise version of the For the People Act) await Senate passage. Fifty Senators have voted four times to begin debate on some of them, but all Senate Republicans (with one exception) voted to block them.
No Senate loophole should stand in the way. The filibuster, as abused in today’s Senate, gives a minority of 41 out of 100 senators veto power over legislation being debated, unless it is subject to a filibuster exception. Those 41 senators can represent just 24 percent of the population.
Biden himself has expressed interest in solving this problem. He has spoken forcefully about voting rights. He has signed executive orders, installed voting rights advocates in the Department of Justice and nominated them to the federal bench, and tasked the vice president with leading this work.
But there is no substitute for legislation, and the time to act is now. Recently, more than 150 democracy scholars wrote that “defenders of democracy in America still have a slim window of opportunity to act. But time is ticking away, and midnight is approaching.”
If we are to lead by the “power of our example,” President Biden and senators must step up and do what it takes to pass these bills as quickly as possible. When our leaders embark on the year of action at the summit, this must be a top priority. Democracy is resilient, and they have the power to act. We cannot afford to wait.
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.