Cyrena Kokolis

In the 2024 elections, only about four percent of U.S. House seats changed hands from one party to another. Four percent. It doesn’t seem possible to make our political system even more rigid. But the two major parties are trying anyway. In advance of the 2026 midterms, state legislators are racing to redraw congressional maps to make seats safer for one party or the other. To make matters worse, the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v.

Image Credit: Allison Saeng For Unsplash+ In Defense of Civil Society, a column from the staff at Protect Democracy, provides timely, research-driven analysis on why protecting American democracy requires protecting civil society and how nonprofits can navigate this moment, stand in solidarity, and continue our mission-oriented work.

Last week, Congress ended the longest government shutdown in American history… with a deal that keeps the government open for about 10 weeks. In other words, we could be starting the same fight all over again as soon as late January. If you’re starting to think that Congress is irredeemably broken, we get it. The simple fact is that right now, Congress is a disaster. Even before the shutdown, it was not doing its job — not passing laws, not solving problems, not serving the American people.