News Clips

“If the court orders additional proceedings in the district court, holding trial before the election will become virtually impossible,” said a brief supporting Mr. Smith from Common Cause, a watchdog group.

For the past four years, a heavy cloud has hung over Ohio and our state legislature in the form of House Bill 6 and disgraced former Speaker Larry Householder. The HB 6 scheme has been a textbook example of corruption, embarrassing Ohioans with endless indictments, guilty verdicts and negative news stories. Now, four years later, it still dominates headlines, with the recent revelation of payments to conservative groups to support Gov. Mike DeWine, Lt. Gov. John Husted, and Senate President Matt Huffman.

One voting rights group, Common Cause, had the wherewithal to spell out, in no uncertain terms, that the justices are already tipping the scales in favor of Trump and that the public would be well within its right to view the justices as partisan hacks if they drag things out any further. “If this Court’s delay in disposing of this appeal has the result of preventing the case from going to trial prior to the election—or going to trial at all—it would give many Americans the sense that the Court, through its arbitrary and unexplained management of its own docket, has played partisan favorites in the midst of a heated presidential election,” the group wrote in a public filing.

Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, said the records showing the payment is another example of why Ohio needs greater transparency in political spending. We're still learning about public officials proximity to a bribery scandal after years of a swarm of criminal, civil, and regulatory investigations, she said. The complicated picture is a feature and not a bug, she said. The system is built to hide malfeasance. "What we do know from this is the governor and lieutenant governor are very comfortable in a dark money system and figured out how to maximize the loophole in transparency to benefit themselves, their friends, and their family," she said. "The governor and lieutenant governor have figured out a way to make dark money work for them."

Meanwhile, the fair election advocacy group Common Cause filed a brief supporting Mr. Smith at the Supreme Court in the D.C. case over Mr. Trump's claim of absolute immunity, saying the justices must decide the issue swiftly so the trial can take place before the November election and, ironically, so politics don't appear to be at play. "The American people deserve a trial and a verdict on these serious charges before they go to the polls in November," said Virginia Kase Solomón, president of Common Cause. "The presumptive Republican presidential nominee stands criminally charged with conspiracy and obstruction stemming from his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It is critically important that the Supreme Court rule quickly, as it has in past presidential cases, so that justice can be rendered before Americans cast their ballots."

Annastacia Belladonna-Carrera, executive director of Common Cause Minnesota, a nonprofit that advocates for government transparency, also had concerns. She said, "Sen. Hoffman's use of this title for marketing his consulting business as 'senator', along with the use of pictures taken while at the Capitol campus, can arguably be seen as him leveraging his public role for private gain." Belladonna-Carrera suggested the legislative branch could benefit from having clearer rules for lawmakers. "This branch of government — I would argue the most public facing and accountable to the people particularly because of what it does and who it is supposed to be working for — is once again the one with the least accountability and transparency," she said.