As Americans, we have strong tools rooted in our Constitution and system of checks and balances to prevent our democracy from declining into a more authoritarian form of government. With experience upholding the guardrails of democracy in the American government, and working with experts who study the rise and fall of democracies around the world, we’ve identified key areas of risk that need our immediate attention. Here is what we’re doing to Protect our Democracy in each of those key areas:
A generally shared agreement about basic facts is that they are indispensable to constitutional democracy. They allow a citizenry to debate policies from within the same reality, and to ultimately hold their government accountable. That is why autocrats seek to undermine truth in order to avoid accountability. Changes in our media landscape have undermined our shared reality, and President Trump has all but declared war on truth and basic facts. We are working to check the government’s ability to deliberately spread misinformation to help protect the American people’s ability to self-govern.
The Trump Administration this week doubled down on a faulty report issued earlier this year that transparently manipulated data to frame foreign-born people as terrorism threats – a study the administration has cited to justify its punitive, misguided immigration policies. On January 16, the U.S. Department of Justice…
July 12 — Earlier today, the nonpartisan advocacy group Protect Democracy filed a federal lawsuit against the Donald J. Trump for President Campaign alleging that it conspired with Russian agents and Wikileaks to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. This is the same case that, days ago, President…
On May 3, 2018, Protect Democracy, the Brennan Center for Justice, Michael F. Crowley, and Benjamin Wittes filed a complaint in federal court against the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security under the Information Quality Act, demanding the retraction or correction of a misleading report on the…
Today, Protect Democracy filed a second suit against the Trump Administration for documents related to their plans for the 2020 Census, following up on the refusal of the Commerce Department and the Office of Management and Budget to comply with FOIA requests filed on November 22, 2017. Read…
On January 16, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a report entitled “Executive Order 13780: Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States, Initial Section 11 Report” (the “Report”). From the Trump Administration’s perspective, the Report…
