The 2024 election is over, and the country now looks to a second term with Donald Trump as president.
Though Trump has cited anti-democratic ideals as part of his agenda, his election does not mean voters support him attempting to dismantle democracy.
The president is not a king or a dictator, and CLC stands ready to hold his administration accountable, protect the rule of law and defend our system of checks and balances. We also will continue to shine a light on the actions of the Trump administration, as we do for all government officials elected to be responsive to the people.
CLC's President Trevor Potter and Senior Vice Presidents Paul Smith and Bruce Spiva lay out CLC’s plan for preserving democracy in the final episode of the Democracy Decoded podcast.
There is hard work ahead and CLC is here to do it.
CLC is on guard to preserve the rule of law and the Constitution from overreach and authoritarianism. No one is above the law, and we will not allow a president to ignore the constraints the Constitution imposes on using the military, the Department of Justice or other executive branch agencies to go after fellow Americans for personal or political reasons.
While the Supreme Court recently ruled that a president can’t be prosecuted for “official acts,” presidents can still be held accountable for acts that are not within their official responsibilities. This includes political acts or personal acts.
Courts can also order the president to stop violating the law while he is in office through injunctions against criminal violations. CLC will be watching to see how much the courts are willing to try to rein a Trump administration in and, in turn, how much President-elect Trump is going to be willing to defy court orders.
To be clear, the Supreme Court’s immunity decision affects a president after his term for having done something that violates the law and is unconstitutional. That's very different from the question of “can an administration get away with breaking the law?”
If the administration does break the law, the first thing that will happen is that people who are affected by that will go to court to say the action is illegal and must stop. There is nothing in the immunity decision to prevent judicial review of actions by the executive branch if they violate current law.
We'll also be working very hard to avoid the politicization of the government by the White House, like trying to get rid of people based on their political affiliation or their willingness to support unethical actions pursued by President-elect Trump.
We will also continue to fight for fair voting maps and advancing reforms at the state level that make democracy stronger and more inclusive. States themselves can also serve as bastions of democracy. States exist as part of the whole checks and balances system and can push back against the federal government.
Another area we will be closely watching is campaign finance. Wealthy special interests representing all ends of the ideological spectrum spent unprecedented amounts throughout the 2024 cycle — secretly, in many cases. We also saw boundaries be pushed further than ever when it came to coordination between campaigns and outside groups and actors.
For instance, Elon Musk leveraged his enormous personal wealth to become an integral part of the Trump campaign while also spending money on it. Despite operating a super PAC that spent heavily to support his favored candidate, he appeared at Trump rallies and coordinated with Trump campaign officials.
President-elect Trump announced plans to give Elon Musk a major role in the administration, so there will be a direct line between the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars to support a candidate and the ability to affect government policy. CLC stands ready to hold all members of the administration to account.
Expanding democracy in the United States has never been a straight line. From the beginning, only white male landowners could exercise the freedom to vote, and each subsequent generation of Americans has gone through a fight to try to achieve the ideal of democracy.
Our focus now must be on the future. We will work tirelessly to make sure we have free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028 and prevent any interference by the Trump administration in those elections.
It may be that the challenges to come are even more significant and more severe than we faced, at least in living memory. But CLC, our allies and the American people will remain vigilant and push back using whatever levers of power we can find to insist that democracy must survive.
