Read our Fall 2024 Newsletter issued on October 3! You will find updates from our Washington, D.C., office, information about our new civic education materials, our State Oversight’s Academy 2024 symposium, upcoming event dates, and much more!
Message from the Director
Election day is a little more than a month away. Absentee ballots are now arriving in many mailboxes, and our attention is rightfully focused on the momentous decisions we as voters will be making. And while the Levin Center generally focuses on improving government effectiveness between elections, our work is ultimately about informing the voting public about how our system of democratic governance works and whether our leaders – especially elected lawmakers – are meeting their obligation to represent us.
To that end, the Levin Center recently has taken significant steps to shed light on how lawmakers in Congress and the states are using their oversight power. In July, the Center hosted a dozen leading congressional scholars and oversight practitioners to review the first set of working papers examining oversight based on data from our Congressional Oversight Records Database (CORD). Our State Oversight Academy hosted our second Oversight Symposium that brought together state lawmakers and scholars who study state policymaking to review another set of new papers and discuss ways that academics and lawmakers can collaborate to strengthen oversight.
To share the latest developments in congressional oversight, we are now publishing on our website the “Congressional Investigations Digest,” compiled by the K&L Gates law firm, which summarizes all the congressional oversight activity occurring each month. And we are continuing to track and update developments with important court cases that affect the power of the legislative branch to obtain information needed to conduct oversight.
To prepare the next generation to meet their civic responsibilities, the Levin Center last week launched a new set of U.S. history and civics lesson plans and materials, called Learning by Hearings (LbH), based on congressional investigations that shaped American history. The LbH materials, which include videos produced by Detroit PBS, were developed with support from the State of Michigan and meet Michigan’s standards for social studies education.
With these efforts, the Levin Center is helping to give people of all ages information they can use to hold elected officials accountable when we cast our ballots and all the days in between.
Jim Townsend — Director, Levin Center
