In part two of our video discussion, Debilyn Molineaux, CEO/president of the Bridge Alliance and co-publisher of The Fulcrum, continues a conversation about the desire for electoral reforms and cross-partisan support for legislation, which are seemingly in conflict during debate over the For The People Act.
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This week's congressional agenda includes anti-fraud legislation, ICE funding, FISA Section 702 renewal debates, and major committee hearings.
Richard Sharrocks / Getty Images
Fraud, Funding, and FISA
Jun 11, 2026
Fraud
This week in the House is Fraud Week based on the large number of bills likely to receive a vote that in some way are intended to decrease or eliminate many different kinds of fraud. Example bills up for a vote include:
- H.R. 428: Bonuses for Cost-Cutters and Fraud Preventers Act, as amended which would expand the opportunities for cash bonuses to staff who can cut costs. We see no way that this could go wrong and instead incentivize new ways of defrauding the government.
- H.R. 6338: Stop Illegal Fishing Act
- H.R. 7892: No Aid for Ghost Students Act of 2026
Funding
One bill will likely become law this week if it passes the House:
This is the much discussed reconciliation bill which will provide even more money to the DHS agencies ICE and CBP through 2029. (Our post from this past Friday with more detail
FISA Section 702
This part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Section 702, is controversial because it can result in spying on US citizens without warrants ever being issued.
There are opponents of Section 702 as it’s currently constructed in both parties which makes passing a renewal without some modifications difficult.
Further, while it is true that the authorities in Section 702 will lapse this week, that doesn’t mean that all surveillance under its authority ends immediately.
Why not? Because there is a court, the FISA Court, which handles things related to foreign intelligence surveillance. In March, they certified the use of Section 702 through next year (while limiting the use of certain tools by certain agencies).
Further still, the President announced last week that he was making the Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Bill Pulte, the acting Director of National Intelligence.
The combination of pre-existing objections to Section 702, the fact that it won’t really end if the law lapses and Trump’s preference for Pulte as acting Director of National lntelligence all point to another last-minute short-term reauthorization of the law as it currently exists or possibly of it lapsing.
Committee Meetings
There are 46 committee meetings across both chambers of Congress this week. Several about about national defense appropriations and closed to the public. There are some others of potential interest and long-term effect:
- Nuclear Permitting Reform: Legislation to Advance Efficient Licensing; this covers three pieces of legislation aiming to speed the nuclear permitting process.
- Hearings to examine the President’s proposed budget request for fiscal year 2027 for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
- Senate Judiciary to examine, among other things, legislation that would permit televised Supreme Court hearings and another which would expand media coverage (including televised proceedings) within the federal court system.
Fraud, Funding, and FISA was originally published by GovTrack.us and is republished with permission.
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Florida's new congressional map, the Supreme Court's Callais decision, and challenges to voting rights protections raise urgent questions about redistricting, representation, and democratic accountability.
Bill Clark/Getty Images
Florida’s New Map and the Shrinking Window for Accountability
Jun 10, 2026
When the Lines Began Moving Faster Than the Law
On May 4, Governor Ron DeSantis signed Florida’s new congressional map into law. The Legislature had passed it five days earlier, 83 to 28 in the House and 21 to 17 in the Senate. The map redraws four districts in ways that election analysts project would shift them from competitive or Democratic-leaning to safe Republican, potentially expanding a delegation Republicans already control 20 to 8.
The same day the Legislature voted, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais. The Court ruled 6 to 3 that Louisiana’s majority-minority district could not survive Equal Protection scrutiny under the standards applied by the majority. In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the ruling “renders Section 2 all but a dead letter” in redistricting.
Two things happened at once. A state redrew its lines. The federal tool often used to challenge racial vote dilution became harder, and riskier, to wield.
The familiar question today is which party gains.
That question has an answer.
The harder question for the future is what happens to democratic accountability when maps change at the same moment the mechanisms for challenging them are becoming increasingly uncertain.
The Constitutional Squeeze After Callais
Callais left Section 2 formally on the books.
It changed the legal standards plaintiffs must navigate to use it.
States can now argue that racially polarized voting reflects partisanship rather than race.
They can defend their maps by pointing to partisan objectives that Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) already declared nonjusticiable in federal court.
The Court continues to treat partisan intent and racial intent as constitutionally distinct categories, even where voting patterns overlap in practice.
That is what creates the squeeze: A district drawn to comply with Section 2 can now face a constitutional challenge, while the partisan objectives behind the same map remain beyond federal judicial review.
This follows a line.
Shelby County removed federal preclearance in 2013. Rucho closed the federal courts to partisan-gerrymandering claims in 2019.
Callais makes racial-dilution litigation more complicated by sharpening the constitutional tension between Section 2 compliance and race-conscious mapmaking.
Each ruling left state courts and state constitutions carrying more of the weight.
The Slow Unraveling of Florida’s Fair Districts Order
Voters approved the Fair Districts Amendments in 2010 with more than 62 percent of the vote.
Article III, Section 20 of the state constitution prohibits drawing congressional districts with the intent to favor a party or an incumbent.
It also bars drawing districts with the intent or result of diminishing minority communities’ ability to elect representatives of their choice.
On its face, that standard reaches further than federal law.
But the legal foundation under those standards has become increasingly unstable. In July 2025, the Florida Supreme Court held in Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute, Inc. v. Secretary, Florida Department of State that the Fair Districts Amendments’ non-diminishment clause must yield to the federal Equal Protection Clause when the two conflict, and that compliance with the non-diminishment clause does not constitute a compelling governmental interest sufficient to justify a race-conscious district.
Then, four days before the Legislature voted on the 2026 map, DeSantis general counsel David Axelman circulated a memo to lawmakers arguing that the race-based provisions of the Fair Districts Amendments are unconstitutional and non-severable from the partisan-intent prohibition.
His argument: because the racial-protection provisions cannot survive Equal Protection scrutiny, the entire voter-approved anti-gerrymandering package falls with them. If that argument is accepted, the prohibition on partisan gerrymandering, the provision Florida voters passed with 62 percent support, would be swept out alongside the racial protections it was never designed to replace.
The Calendar Is Already Deciding the Outcome
A coalition of voting and civil rights groups sued under Article III, Section 20. They pointed to Jason Poreda, the DeSantis aide who drew the map, testifying that he had reviewed partisan data. On May 26, Circuit Judge Joshua Hawkes, a DeSantis appointee, declined to block it. He found the testimony insufficient to establish impermissible intent attributable to the full Legislature. He invoked Purcell v. Gonzalez, the principle that courts should avoid disrupting elections already underway, writing that “the public interest weighs more in favor of certainty than a haphazard judicial mandate of discarded maps.”
He reserved the constitutionality of the Fair Districts Amendments for later proceedings. In a footnote, he acknowledged the merits timeline is “more geared toward the 2028 or 2030 election cycles than the 2026 election cycle.”
That footnote is the institutional problem in a single sentence.
Candidate qualifying runs June 8 through June 12. The primary is August 18. The general election is November 3. Plaintiffs have noticed an appeal. A ruling that arrives after 2026 arrives after the election it was meant to govern.
Florida as the Testing Ground
Florida matters beyond its own litigation. It holds the third-largest congressional delegation in the country. Its demographic complexity, combined with a fast-shifting electorate across Miami-Dade, Broward, and the I-4 corridor, makes it a leading-edge case study for how redistricting disputes unfold when federal remedies narrow. The legal reasoning emerging here is already appearing in redistricting disputes elsewhere.
Florida’s sequence is already replicating.
Tennessee enacted a new map on May 7 that breaks apart a majority-Black Memphis district, using arguments about partisan intent that Callais strengthened.
Alabama, which the Supreme Court ordered in 2023 to draw a remedial majority-minority district, is now seeking emergency relief to reinstate its original maps, pointing to Callais as changed circumstances that reopen the question.
The legal pathway being constructed in Florida is not merely local.
It is an early iteration of an argument other states are watching and borrowing.
Institutional Lag and the Hollowing of Accountability
A map changes in a single legislative session. Litigation moves across cycles. A challenge can be correct and still be slow. And when a judge tells you in a footnote that the merits belong to a future election, the calendar has already decided something the courts have not.
The asymmetry runs past timing. Drawing a map takes a legislature and a contractor. Challenging one takes expert witnesses, mapping analysis, and years of funded litigation, usually carried by nonprofits against state attorneys general with public resources. A legal protection that exists on paper depends on someone with the capacity to enforce it.
Accountability has a concrete meaning here.
It is whether communities whose representational weight is restructured have a legal path that resolves before the map becomes the baseline for the next redistricting cycle. When district lines, legal standards, and election calendars move in the same direction simultaneously, that path narrows for everyone, regardless of which party benefits this cycle.
Why the Courts Keep Waiting
The case for judicial restraint is real.
Legislatures hold the constitutional power to draw districts. Courts that redraw maps invite the charge that judges are choosing winners. Purcell exists because election administration requires predictability. And the constitutional risk embedded in race-conscious mapmaking is genuine, not invented, which is why Callais is not easily dismissed.
None of these arguments is partisan.
Each survives scrutiny.
They also share one consequence. Each one counsels waiting, and in a system built on fixed election cycles, waiting is the variable that determines whether a remedy arrives in time to mean anything.
Representation Does Not Wait for the Verdict
The courts will rule eventually.
The harder thing to see is what carries accountability in the years before they do.
When the lines move faster than the law that governs them, representation does not wait for the verdict.
Ethan J. Martinez is a Miami-based independent political analyst and founder of The Fourth Turning Point, a publication covering electoral systems, institutional legitimacy, and political realignment with more than 66,500 cumulative views across readers in all 50 states and 67 countries.
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woman with US American flag on her shoulders
Photo by Josh Johnson on Unsplash
How America Redraws Belonging
Jun 10, 2026
America has always redrawn the boundaries of belonging.
What counts as "us" has never been fixed. The lines have shifted over time, sometimes slowly and sometimes painfully, but they have always shifted.
I was reminded of this recently after joining a social media group centered on Southern Italian identity. Many of the posts focused on discrimination against southern Italians in both Italy and the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. Some of the stories were familiar. Others were new to me. Yet I remember hearing similar conversations as a child in the 1960s, listening to older relatives describe what it meant to be Italian in America before Italians were fully accepted into the American mainstream.
That acceptance was not automatic.
The original American establishment largely defined itself through an Anglo-Protestant lens. English ancestry, Protestant Christianity, and northern European roots formed the cultural core of what was considered "real" American identity. Groups that arrived later often found themselves standing outside that circle.
The Irish experienced this. So did Jews, Slavs, Greeks, and Italians.
Southern Italians arrived during a period of industrial upheaval, urban overcrowding, and rising nationalism. They were often portrayed as poor, uneducated, overly Catholic, or culturally incompatible with the existing American order. The 1891 lynching of eleven Italian immigrants in New Orleans remains one of the largest mass lynchings in American history, yet it occupies little space in our national memory.
Many southern Italians also carried another burden before reaching America: the divide between the north and the south of Italy. Following Italian unification, some northern intellectuals portrayed southern Italians as culturally and even racially inferior. Pseudoscientific theories claimed that southern Italians were less "European" than their northern counterparts, sometimes emphasizing Mediterranean or African influences in southern ancestry. Today, these theories are rightly discredited, but at the time, they shaped perceptions on both sides of the Atlantic.
Yet something changed.
The children and grandchildren of these immigrants learned English, served in the military, entered the professions, moved into the suburbs, and increasingly married outside their ethnic communities. Over time, the boundaries of the accepted American identity expanded to include them.
That tells us something important about America. The country has repeatedly absorbed groups once viewed as outsiders and folded them into the larger national identity. The process is rarely immediate, and it is never purely moral. It is shaped by economics, politics, military service, intermarriage, and demographic change.
Most importantly, it is shaped by a society's need to define who belongs.
That instinct is ancient. Every civilization creates an inner circle. Citizen and foreigner. Believer and infidel. Insider and outsider. Human beings organize themselves into groups because belonging provides order, trust, and a sense of shared purpose.
America is no exception.
Today, we often speak as though racial and ethnic categories are fixed and permanent. History suggests otherwise. The boundaries of the American mainstream have shifted repeatedly. Groups once viewed with suspicion gradually became accepted parts of the national fabric. Each transition felt controversial in its own era. Each later became normalized.
That raises an important question: what categories that seem permanent today will appear fluid a century from now?
Hispanic Americans may be experiencing a similar transition. The label encompasses people with diverse histories and backgrounds, many of whom are gradually being incorporated into the broader American identity through the same forces that shaped earlier immigrant groups: mobility, intermarriage, and cultural integration.
Black America represents a different story. Its identity was forged through slavery, segregation, and a shared historical experience unique to the United States. Yet even here, new generations of immigrants, multiracial families, and evolving cultural identities continue to challenge older frameworks.
At the same time, a new form of tribalism may be emerging. Increasingly, Americans divide themselves less by ancestry and more by education, ideology, geography, religion, and class. The old ethnic walls are weakening even as new cultural walls rise in their place.
Perhaps that is why so many of our debates feel unsettled. America no longer fully agrees on what binds us together. Is it ancestry? Shared values? Constitutional principles? Economic opportunity? Culture? Some combination of all of them?
A healthy society must balance two competing realities. It must preserve enough shared identity to maintain trust and cohesion, while remaining flexible enough to absorb new people and new influences. Too rigid, and societies fracture through exclusion. Too fluid, and they fracture through the loss of any common story at all.
That tension may be one of the defining challenges of modern America.
As I think back on those stories from older relatives decades ago, I realize they described more than just prejudice. They were describing the slow process of crossing a boundary into acceptance. They understood something many of us have forgotten: belonging is rarely automatic. It is negotiated across generations.
The club changes. The boundaries move. The arguments repeat themselves. Only the names are different.
Joe Palaggi is a writer and historian whose work sits at the crossroads of theology, politics, and American civic culture. He writes about the moral and historical forces that shape our national identity and the challenges of a polarized age.
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Portrait of Sojourner Truth (ca. 1797-1883), leader of the Underground Railroad.
Bettmann / Getty Images
Sojourner’s Truth
Jun 10, 2026
As the United States prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of its founding later this summer, there will be extensive celebration and reflection about our democracy and the values it embodies. But the 250th is not the only anniversary that should capture our attention. Indeed, our nation’s story is an evolution of moments built over time.
One of these building blocks occurred 175 years ago, in 1851, during the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio. There, on May 29th, Sojourner Truth delivered a legendary speech that called on attendees to reject the racial and gender biases used to limit her place in society and to defy a status quo that devalued her as a Black woman and treated her as invisible and expendable. Her speech is worthy of reflection today because it reveals an important story about how different people experience our democracy — and that story should inform how we build a more inclusive vision for our future.
Sojourner Truth’s life defied expectations. She was born into slavery in the North and later won her freedom, becoming an acclaimed speaker, preacher, and activist. In her speech to the Women’s Convention, she challenged the audience to see her for who she really was.
Truth spoke with clarity and conviction about the architecture of oppression that conspired to diminish her. She proclaimed that her experiences, abilities, and humanity merited the same respect and dignity afforded to men and to white women. She pushed back on the infrastructure of inequity — the systemic barriers rooted in stereotypes and false narratives erected to limit her life — and argued that advancing women’s rights and autonomy required our society to tear down these barriers. And she spoke about the futility of denying progress to women and Black people, arguing that such gains would not be a threat but a reflection of collective progress.
Her words still resonate. Although our modern fights are different, many of the same underlying issues remain — entrenched biases, efforts to limit women’s roles and rights, attacks on women’s autonomy, and attempts to raise doubts on women’s abilities, especially those of Black women. We can learn much from her wisdom.
In 2026, people in power are still trying to deny opportunities to women. This includes officials in the Trump administration questioning the skills of women serving in the military, or President Trump’s repeated attacks on the qualifications of high-profile Black women. Just like Truth, we must be willing to call out inequity and discrimination and reject outdated prejudices and assumptions about women.
For too long, flaws in our democracy have excluded certain groups — like women and people of color — from full participation. We must support efforts to fill those gaps by protecting the infrastructure needed to expand civil rights for all. This work is even more important as the Trump administration has moved to dismantle longstanding safeguards and civil rights offices that were established to enforce the law.
Sojourner Truth refused to be defined by the stereotypes society tried to construct about her. We must follow her example and be vigilant in combatting false narratives and, instead, elevate women’s voices to tell their own stories. Too often, caricatures are deployed to justify unfair and unjust treatment. Policymakers defend draconian cuts to Medicaid by maligning the work ethic or honesty of low-income women, despite substantial evidence to the contrary.
Even Truth’s speech fell victim to apparent inaccuracies as it was retold over the years. The phrase most often attributed to her — “Ain’t I a Woman” — was added years later in a version produced by a white abolitionist. The wording crudely mimicked a Southern dialect and syntax attributed to a slave, even though Truth was from the North, perhaps to fit a preferred profile rather than Truth’s reality. Confronting these kinds of distortions is part of the larger work of reckoning with the contradictions at the heart of our country’s history.
The story of America is the story of our 250-year struggle to create a more perfect union. Sojourner Truth’s words, delivered 175 years ago, tell an important part of the story that too often gets overlooked — hard truths about where we have fallen short, but that offer a pathway for progress.
Sojourner Truth was clear-eyed about the strengths and weaknesses of our American democracy and fought for something better. Achieving that something better is deeply connected to our ability to learn and not run from or obscure our past. To make progress, we must be clear about who we are, who we have been, and where we need to go to forge a new direction and fight for a better future for all.
Jocelyn Frye is the President of National Partnership for Women & Families.
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