Today, as the House Judiciary Committee prepares to vote on an impeachment inquiry, Common Cause continued its call for Members to support the investigation in response to White House non-cooperation and stonewalling of any attempts to investigate past and current potential criminal conduct or wrongdoing by President Trump or members of his administration. Common Cause mobilized its 1.2 million members over the congressional recess to gain additional Member support for the impeachment inquiry in the U.S. House of Representatives.   

Today, Common Cause, Verified Voting, and The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law released a report on Rhode Island’s pilot program to identify the most effective methods to implement the risk-limiting audits (RLA) required by the state for the 2020 election. The three organizations were part of a working group that helped the state design and run the pilots earlier this year.

Today, Common Cause urged President Donald Trump and the Senate to quickly nominate and confirm new commissioners to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to avert a crisis that would leave the agency largely powerless to enforce campaign finance laws without a quorum. The resignation of Vice Chairman Matthew S. Petersen, effective at the end of the month, will leave the FEC with only three commissioners, one short of the minimum required for the FEC to act and well short of the six required by statute. With the 2020 election cycle well underway, the letter urges the president to treat the situation as an emergency and fill the vacancies expediently.  

Today, Common Cause released a new report on the impact of denying voting rights to people with past felony convictions and what must be done to strengthen their voting rights. “Zero Disenfranchisement: The Movement to Restore Voting Rights” documents the racist history of felony disenfranchisement laws, the new movement to repeal them, and provides several personal stories of individuals affected by these voter suppression efforts.

Today, GateHouse Media and Gannett Co. announced plans to merge to form an unprecedented newspaper conglomerate. The $1.4 billion deal would combine the two largest newspaper chains, creating the largest newspaper publisher in the United States. A combined GateHouse-Gannett entity would own one in every six newspapers in the nation and control over 100 local news operations.

As our nation grieves back-to-back mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, over the weekend, Common Cause calls attention to the increasing connections between recent mass killings in which the shooters claim, or are found to have been part of, fringe white supremacist groups.