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It turns out unrigging Washington is very popular. This week, End Citizens United’s Unrig Washington [ [link removed] ] campaign expanded and now includes more than 120 Democratic members of Congress and congressional candidates. At a time when voters are hungry for change to address the broken system, Unrig Washington centers three major reforms to address rampant corruption: Banning congressional stock trading, refusing corporate PAC money, and cracking down on dark money. The program initially launched this fall, with the participation of dozens of Democratic leaders like Senators Jon Ossoff (GA), Elizabeth Warren (MA), and Chris Murphy (CT). Now, the participation of over 120 members of Congress and congressional candidates shows that as they gain momentum ahead of the 2026 midterms, Democrats are coalescing around fighting corruption as a unifying message. Illinois Lt. Governor Juliana Stratton, running to represent Illinois in the U.S. Senate, puts it best when she says [ [link removed] ], “I want your voices to take me to Washington, not the voices of billionaire CEOs and corporations.”
An easy trick for winning back the House in 2026. The National Journal [ [link removed] ]reports [ [link removed] ] on just that — how Democrats across the country are leaning into anti-corruption messaging ahead of the midterms. “As public trust in institutions continues to wane, Democratic candidates running for the House are increasingly railing against corruption. The issue could have renewed potency as frequent headlines about backroom deals, shady stock trades, and kickbacks for close allies emerge from Washington.” The report quotes President of End Citizens United Tiffany Muller explaining that corruption, “consistently emerges as one of the defining issues for voters, and it’s because they actually connect it back to all the other issues that are important to them. So whether it is cost of living, or rising grocery prices, or prescription drug costs, or climate change, or gun safety, we know that the money and politics, the corruption and politics, is causing the gridlock and dysfunction on all these issues.”
There’s plenty of corruption to call out. This week, 90 former members of Congress wrote a letter [ [link removed] ] to current congressional leadership to demand that they advance the Restore Trust in Congress Act, which would restrict how members of Congress can trade stocks, commodities and securities, reports Open Secrets. [ [link removed] ] “The American people understand that our elected lawmakers cannot be both the referee and the player — that presents a clear conflict of interest,” the former lawmakers write. “Even the appearance of self-dealing does damage.” The lawmakers also cite reporting by the Wall Street Journal that showed that this spring lawmakers’ stock trading picked up amidst President Trump’s tariff rollout, making it more than plausible that lawmakers could have traded with insider information.
The Justice Department wants our voter data. The DOJ has requested voter data from at least 26 states, according to the Associated Press [ [link removed] ]. Election officials told the AP that they are concerned, because federal laws protect the sharing of individual information with the federal government. The DOJ is suing Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington over their “failure” to turn over statewide voter registration lists. These requests come as part of the Trump Administration’s much broader effort to gather voter information, including in ways [ [link removed] ] that could lead to the government purging voting rolls and increasing surveillance of both immigrants and citizens.
President Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who in 2022 had been extradited to the United States and charged with accepting a $1 million bribe from the drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and protecting narcotics dealers. “US prosecutors argued that he was a central figure in a more than 18-year-long drug trafficking scheme that funnelled over 400 tons of cocaine into the US-equivalent to roughly 4.5 billion individual doses,” reports the BBC [ [link removed] ]. Trump’s long-time advisor Roger Stone reportedly told Trump that Orlando Hernandez’s release would be good for the conservative National Party during Honduras’s upcoming elections.
Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth risked putting American troops in danger with his lax use of the messaging app Signal, according to a new report [ [link removed] ] published by the Pentagon’s inspector general, reports [ [link removed] ]Politico [ [link removed] ]. [ [link removed] ] News of this breach comes during the same week that bipartisan members of Congress have launched investigations into the U.S. military’s now frequent bombing of boats in the Caribbean and whether Hegseth ordered a second attack on a boat while knowing that there were survivors from the first attack onboard. According to [ [link removed] ]The Washington Post [ [link removed] ], “Current and former U.S. officials and some military experts have said that the Pentagon’s legal campaign– which has killed more than 80 people — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.” The family of one Colombian fisherman that the U.S. military killed in these attacks has filed a formal complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, calling his “extrajudicial killing” a violation of equality before the law, a fair trial, and due process.
The Trump Administration keeps finding new forms of anti-immigrant cruelty. The Trump Administration has paused all asylum cases [ [link removed] ], and paused green card, and citizenship [ [link removed] ] applications for people from 19 countries, including Afghanistan, Haiti, Venezuela, and Cuba. The Administration has also fired at least two dozen immigration judges [ [link removed] ] over the last two weeks, reportedly [ [link removed] ] because they were “too lenient” on asylum cases, and they will reportedly be replaced by “deportation judges” who will deny immigrants legal status at higher rates. Amidst all this, in New York City, ICE detained a father and separated him from his six-year-old child [ [link removed] ], who is still missing and cannot be found.
Many Trump voters don’t like this, either. In 2024, Trump won Tennessee’s 7th District by 22 points. This week, Aftyn Behn, the Democratic candidate in the special election for the district, lost by just nine points. So, an insurgent Democratic candidate running on fighting corruption cut into Republicans’ margin of victory by 13 points in just one year. That’s pretty astounding, really. Look, we have about a year before the 2026 midterms. So, at this pace, there’s no stopping Democrats who take a page from Behn and keep bringing the conversation back to [ [link removed] ], as she said, “The fact that billionaires and greedy corporations have rigged our system and for us to be scapegoating each other, rather than going after the real culprits — and as I said at the beginning of our conversation — it’s not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom. Tennesseans are struggling. People are struggling to afford rent. They are struggling to afford living.”
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