Trump Administration/Executive Ethics

Despite endorsing Bank Your Vote, on the trail, Trump has continued to cast doubt on the legitimacy and security of mail voting in particular. Aaron Scherb with Common Cause says this is a huge hurdle for the RNC. He says Republicans across the country have been maligning mail voting since 2020. He says it's going to be hard for them to convince their voters to get over a distrust they created. AARON SCHERB: So getting voters to, like, unlearn or unhear those messages is tough to undo that damage. And so I think that's what this Bank the Vote program is trying to essentially do. It's somewhat analogous to getting a jury to unhear extremely damaging information that's presented against a defendant.

Virginia Kase Solomón will be the next president and CEO of Common Cause. Currently CEO of the League of Women Voters, she will start her new role in February and will be the first Hispanic person to lead the democratic watchdog. She succeeds Karen Hobert Flynn, who died this spring after three decades with the organization.

Following this ruling, Colorado Common Cause and former Colorado Secretary of State Mary Estill Buchanan filed an amicus brief in the Colorado Supreme Court asserting that former President Donald Trump should be excluded from the ballot under the 14th Amendment for his role in the January 6th insurrection. Specifically, Common Cause’s amicus brief urges that the Court affirm the findings of the District Court that Donald Trump engaged in insurrection against the Constitution of the United States, and that the Court reverse the finding that the disqualification clause does not apply to the presidency.

Several law professors as well as Colorado Common Cause and the Constitutional Accountability Center, which advocates for a progressive reading of the founding document, urged the state’s justices to bar Trump from the state’s ballot. The filing from Common Cause, a government watchdog group, called it “a great credit to prior generations of American political leaders” that the disqualification clause of the Constitution had so rarely been invoked — but argued this case rose to that standard. “The fact that the Disqualification Clause is so clearly implicated at this hour, then, is a proportionally great discredit to Mr. Trump himself, who allowed a lust for power to supersede his own Oath of Office and over two centuries of American political precedent,” the filing reads.

Top Grassroots Lobbyists Aaron Scherb, Common Cause

A former Republican Colorado secretary of state, Mary Estill Buchanan, joined advocacy group Colorado Common Cause in an amicus brief supporting the plaintiffs’ case, telling the court that “this country and its institutions are at a crossroads.” “(Trump) allowed a lust for power to supersede his own Oath of Office and over two centuries of American political precedent. Mr. Trump has sought at every turn to inject chaos into our country’s electoral system in the upcoming 2024 presidential election,” the brief said. “He should be given no opportunity to do so in the state of Colorado.”