News Clips

Aaron Scherb, senior director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, said it appears Trump will skate, thanks to historically lax federal enforcement on the question. “Coordination is still certainly illegal here, although the FEC has shown next to no appetite for enforcing coordination rules and laws. There’s not a smoking gun here per se, but it seems like exploitation of a loophole, and three GOP commissioners have shown zero willingness to investigate and enforce existing coordination laws,” Scherb said. “Until they do, special interests and dark money groups will continue to exploit loopholes at the expense of everyday voters.”

"Outside groups are making up the difference," said Aaron Scherb, a lobbyist on campaign finance and election issues for Common Cause, a watchdog group that advocates for increasing transparency in campaign finance.

Complaints against Li “Cindy” Yang, who raised campaign cash and parlayed persistence to gain access to Republican circles in Florida and get pictures taken with the then-president, were filed by Common Cause, a Washington-based watchdog group, and the Campaign Legal Center. The dismissal of those complaints came three years after the Miami Herald first revealed Yang’s activities in a series of articles titled Trump Tourism.

John M. Marion, executive director Common Cause Rhode Island, on Friday said his organization is considering filing a complaint with the state Board of Elections over the ad, which is titled “Who’s Worse?” Common Cause pushed for a 2012 political spending transparency law in response to the US Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, and the law requires ads by outside groups to list the top five donors to those groups. But Marion noted that the Latino Victory Fund ad did not list its top donors. “That is clearly violating the state’s disclosure law,” Marion said. “That is one of the issues we are considering filing a complaint about.”

“Officeholders are deciding on matters that present a choice between a fundamental belief in democracy or authoritarian rule; between you and me having power in our vote and voice, or others taking that way from us,” said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause in a prepared statement with the Scorecard’s release.  See the full results at https://democracyscorecard.org.

Common Cause also ranked individual members of Congress on their pro-democracy efforts, with 101 members — all Democrats — earning a perfect score. That's a more than 70% increase over the number of members of Congress who had perfect scores (58) in the 2020 Democracy Scorecard. Common Cause President Karen Hobert Flynn cited the legislative filibuster as the roadblock to pro-democracy reform.  "In the end, with high levels of support in Congress and an overwhelming outpouring of public support, Congress ran into one of the reasons our democracy needs to be modernized: the filibuster," she wrote in the report.