Campaign Finance

Americans Now Must Hear from Special Counsel Robert Mueller in Open Hearings.

This spring, Enterprise supported a late amendment to Ohio’s transportation budget, leading to a similar scramble in that state. Side-door tactics like these are common but “less than savory,” said Aaron Scherb, legislative director of Common Cause, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on government accountability and transparency. Such moves are usually used to push legislation expected to be unpopular. As in Illinois, the car-sharing companies declared victory.

"At this point it's kind of comparing apples to oranges." Aaron Scherb of the public interest group Common Cause says Trump pretty much has the Republican field to himself. "He might face one or two primary challengers but for the most part he has the full Republican Party fundraising apparatus behind him."

“If a candidate has pledged not to take corporate PAC funds, I would expect that candidate to likewise forego trade association PAC funds because the money’s coming from the same place: corporate stockholders, executives and administrative personnel,” said Paul S. Ryan, the vice president of Common Cause, which opposes corporate money in politics. “A candidate can cite a technical distinction between corporate and trade association PACs in an effort to wiggle out of the pledge, but there’s no principled distinction between the two.”

One Sunday morning in February of last year, Paul S. Ryan, an attorney at Common Cause, a grassroots organization that works to uphold democratic principles, got up early, as he regularly does, and read through the latest news. When he came to a story in the New York Times he had been following, he drank some coffee, ate breakfast with his wife and young son, and went to work.Ryan, who is Common Cause’s vice president of policy and litigation, does not regularly work on weekends. But the Times story had new details in an evolving scandal in which the company that owns the National Enquirer had paid $150,000 to former Playboy model Karen McDougal to buy the rights to a story about her affair with Donald Trump before he became president.

The “For the People Act” offers common sense solutions to problems Americans are demanding that their elected officials solve. These pro-democracy reforms are tested and proven to be effective on the state and local level where citizens, tired of waiting for Washington to act, worked to enact these reforms. Citizen action has moved elected officials in many states and municipalities and citizens have also taken matters into their own hands and passed ballot initiatives. As we outlined in our Democracy on the Ballot report, more than 90% of the pro-democracy reform initiatives passed in each of the last two cycles.