A Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) could be announced as early as today, November 3, and is expected to expand the role of independent spending in American elections. In Citizens United – a case that originally challenged whether the provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) limiting outside groups’ spending should also apply to pay-per-view movies -- the Court appears poised to overreach and open a new door for the deepest-pocketed players to spend money on campaigns to elect or defeat candidates.

All signs indicate the U.S. Supreme Court has a slim majority in support of rolling back restrictions on corporate and union spending in the upcoming decision in Citizens United. Such a move would come as no surprise for the Roberts Court, as the conservative majority has moved steadily toward deregulation of campaigns over the past two years with its Wisconsin Right to Life (2007) and Davis (2008) decisions.

Common Cause today condemned a House Ethics Committee finding that "no relevant House rule or other standard of conduct prohibits the creation of an appearance of a conflict of interest when selecting witnesses for a committee hearing."

The House Ethics Committee on Thursday asserted that no House rule prohibits the creation of an appearance of a conflict of interest in announcing its decision not to investigate Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO) for inviting his friend and neighbor, Brooks Hurst, to testify before a Congressional hearing on renewable fuels without mentioning that Graves' wife and Hurst were investors together in renewable fuels plants in Missouri at the time.

The UC Berkeley School of Law's Center on Health, Economic & Family Security today released a report entitled The Costs and Benefits of a Public Option in Health Care Reform: An Economic Analysis,  which argues that the public option is likely to generate greater benefits and cost savings to the American people than has been projected by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and other independent analysts. Common Cause supports a public option as a way of reducing health care costs and extending health care coverage to more Americans.

The most sweeping reform Congress is considering as it overhauls the nation's health care system is the public option, which would create a government-backed health insurance plan. The Cost and Benefits report argues that previous estimates underestimate the benefits of such a plan because they treat the insurance and provider industries as perfectly competitive markets, failing to account for cost savings from increased competition with a public plan.

The impending Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which could be announced as early as Tuesday, is expected to significantly expand the role of the most powerful special interests in financing American elections. The Court appears poised to turn its back on more than 100 years of law and pave the way for corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on direct campaigns to elect or defeat federal candidates.

Such a dramatic decision would further reduce trust in government policymaking and take our country in the wrong direction. It is hard to imagine how America achieves real progress and tackles critical challenges – like health care, climate change and the economy – when our elected representatives are locked in an all-out fundraising arms race that makes them both more dependent on and vulnerable to the powerful special interests opposed to change.

Our elections are an arms race to see who can raise the most campaign cash—and today’s political strategy is to promote a high cash intake and downplay fundraising efforts that fall short of that goal. Candidates promote these dollar figures as “proof” that their campaign is viable.

Recent Federal Election Commission filings are once again serving as a litmus test for which candidates for Congress are “real” and which are in trouble for next year’s congressional races.

Today, the Washington Post published a front-page article on earmarks that Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-Ind.) secured for a handful of campaign contributors, none of which were based in his home state of Indiana.

“Sadly, it’s no longer a surprise to see these sorts of stories play out in Washington,” said Bob Edgar, president and CEO of Common Cause. “Rep. Visclosky can make it clear to his constituents that their interests, not those of powerful campaign contributors, come first by supporting the Fair Elections Now Act.”

Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.), whose official congressional website touts his work in the auto industry for over 25 years, introduced an amendment to the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2009 that would exclude car dealerships from oversight as outlined in the bill – including six tenants that paid Campbell between $600,000 and $6 million last year in rent, according to the congressman’s own personal financial disclosure forms.

The relationship with the auto dealing industry goes even deeper. Rep. Campbell has taken more than $170,000 in campaign contributions from auto dealers during his congressional career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Although health care reform has eclipsed most other issues this year, Congress is in the midst of overhauling regulations of financial companies after poor oversight led to the financial meltdown last year. Like health care, the industry is fiercely opposed to the most significant reforms, and is spending millions to stop it.

Commercial banks and finance and credit companies have donated more than $5.3 million to the campaigns of House Financial Services Committee members during the last election and so far this year. Commercial banks have spent an additional $25 million in 2009 on lobbying. Finance and credit companies have spent $16.7 million on lobbying this year. Combined, they have spent nearly $42 million on lobbying during the first six months of 2009, about $1.6 million a week, or $229,415 a day.

Common Cause on Thursday released a commendation letter signed by 15,000 people, including former President Jimmy Carter, former Congressman Bob Barr, former Defense Secretaries William Perry and William Cohen and retired Army Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, to those who resisted and fought against the policies of the last Administration that sanctioned and promoted the torture of foreign detainees. Recipients of the commendation letter include US Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, Criminal Investigation Task Force Commander Col. Col. Brittain Mallow, Deputy Commander Mark Fallon, former U.S. Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch and former Army Lt. Col. Darrel J. Vandeveld. Profiles of the honorees may be found here.

Common Cause and the National Press Club on Friday will co-host a panel around the issue of torture of detainees, the legal national and international venues for accountability, and new military justice reforms Congress is considering. The panel will feature a former Army JAG prosecutor who resigned his Guantanamo post in protest, as well as human and civil rights experts.

Common Cause will also release a letter of commendation to military and civilian officials who resisted and fought against the torture policies, often at great personal cost. The letter is signed by more than 16,000 people, including President Carter and ranking retired military officials.

As the House Ethics Committee announced today it was expanding its probe of Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY), Common Cause strongly urged the panel to work faster to conclude the investigation and make public its findings.

"The Ethics Committee is doing no service to the members of Congress or the American people by dragging this investigation out as long as it has," said Common Cause President Bob Edgar. "It's a black cloud hanging over Congressman Rangel, and the drip-drip-drip of allegations simply makes the public more cynical of a Congress it already distrusts. There is no reason why this should take so long."

The Senate Finance Committee handed a major victory to the health care industry Tuesday by voting down two proposals that would have created a "public option" to compete against private health insurance providers as part of an overhaul of the nation's health care system. The industry has fought the public option with lobbying expenses and campaign contributions since the beginning of the year, fearing that the proposed policy would cut into their record profits. A study done earlier this month by Public Campaign Action Fund found that the insurance and HMO industry spent nearly $5 billion per week in reported contributions and lobbying expenses.

At the same time, a poll recently conducted jointly by the Harvard School of Public Health, the Kaiser Family Foundation and National Public Radio found that the vast majority of people don't feel like they personally have a voice in the debate over health care. According to the poll, "Seventy-one percent say that Congress is paying too little attention to what people like them are saying about changes to the health care system, and two-thirds say there is no group in Washington that represents their own views on what's best for the country when it comes to health care, or they don't know if there is such a group."

Like other industries, the health care industry directs most of its campaign contributions to the members of Congress best positioned to influence relevant policies and regulations. More than half the total contributions from health care companies since 1989 have gone to the members who sit on at least one of the five committees in the House or Senate that are currently working on producing health care reform legislation.

The health care industry has given $313.8 million in campaign contributions to current members of Congress since 1989. Of that, $166.7 million or 53 percent has gone to the members of the House and Senate who currently sit on at least one of the five committee with jurisdiction over health care reform, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

As the health care reform debate enters a critical phase in Congress, the health care industry continues to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into lobbying and ad campaigns on top of millions in campaign contributions.

The health care industry is still spending an average of $1.4 million per day on lobbying and has deployed more than 3,000 lobbyists – almost six lobbyists per member of Congress – according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. The pharmaceutical companies alone have spent more than $92 million lobbying legislators this year and, through their trade association, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association (PhRMA), will roll out a $150 million ad campaign in coming weeks to support a plan that does not require drug companies to discount their products as much as other proposals aimed at reducing the nation's total health care bill.

Common Cause is raising concerns over the proposed sale of Diebold's voting systems division to its largest competitor in a move that could give the combined voting machine company as much as 70 percent of the voting systems market. Common Cause is urging the Justice Department to do a thorough review of the proposed deal.

"One company dominating the voting machine market raises concerns about reliability and election fraud issues, and also means it will be harder for election officials to negotiate for voting systems on a limited budget," said Common Cause President Bob Edgar. "It is in the public's interest to have more competition and diversity among voting machine manufacturers, not less."

On the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, President Obama's proposed overhaul of financial regulations faces fierce opposition from the securities and investment industry, which is spending furiously on lobbying Congress and on campaign contributions.

For the first six months of 2009, the financial industry spent $42 million lobbying Congress, as Obama pushes for reforms that would better monitor the financial system and the products that banks and other institutions sell to consumers with the goal of avoiding future economic meltdowns like the one that plunged the United States deep into recession.

"President Obama's speech before a joint session of Congress Wednesday will set the course of the health care package Congress ultimately passes, and will be an important moment for his entire presidency. We applaud this administration for taking on the issue, as escalating health care costs have been a huge national problem for more than a decade.

Public opinion polls consistently show a majority of Americans support a government program to help citizens pay for their health care. Majorities also support slowing the rise of health care costs and bringing more competition to the market. Arrayed against these reforms are the health care companies themselves, who prefer the current system and generate millions, even billions of dollars in political donations, lobbying and public campaigns to keep it.

In the wake of a ruling overturning provisions in Connecticut's landmark state public financing program, Common Cause is vowing to work with the state attorney general to file an immediate stay of the decision and work to overturn it.

"Connecticut can't return to the days when the state was known as 'Corrupticut,'" said Karen Hobert Flynn, vice president for state operations who helped champion passage of the Citizens' Election Program by the state General Assembly in 2005, in the wake of former

Like many others, we at Common Cause are saddened by the death of Sen. Kennedy, and offer our condolences to the Kennedy family.

Sen. Kennedy will be remembered for his many gifts, attributes and accomplishments. At Common Cause, we mourn the passing of an outstanding legislator who had the unique and increasingly rare ability work across party lines and build consensus for the common good.

In the wake of the release of a long-classified CIA report on the agency's interrogation of high-level Al Qaeda detainees and Attorney General Holder's appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate allegations of torture, Common Cause President Bob Edgar on Tuesday called on the new prosecutor to conduct a thorough investigation of the actions of all personnel involved in the decisions to torture detainees, as well as the activities of those who carried out the torture.

"This documentation shows that top Administration officials, including former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee all sought to flout U.S. law prohibiting torture. Any investigation into torture, abuse, or death of detainees should include those who created the legal and military environment where it occurred," said Common Cause President Bob Edgar.