News Clips

“We have a roadmap as to how [McConnell] has operated in the past, which is to be a one-man blockade,” said Stephen Spaulding, a senior counsel at Common Cause, a liberal government reform group. “He will abuse the filibuster rule to demand supermajority votes on nearly every piece of the majority’s agenda. I think we can anticipate that.”

However, this offensive language and loss of civility in politics goes far beyond Trump. The increased lack of civility in politics and public discourse seems to be more of a symptom of a broken system than a cause. Endless money in politics, hyperpartisan gerrymandering and social media without accountability are largely responsible for the decreasing civility we see today.

Time-tested grassroots organizations, such as Common Cause, dominate much of the space with expenses of less than $20 million each year. Common Cause, for instance, couples a D.C. strategy with chapters in 30 states and millions of grassroots members working to champion a panoply of efforts to strengthen democracy, involving voting, ethics, accountability, and other matters. Now imagine if their budgets were $100 million. Their membership could expand across all 50 states, and they could win policies that would reduce corruption that much faster. They could establish pipelines to pass institutional knowledge from one generation to the next. For the first time in years, these groups could stop worrying about whether each program they start will shutter one year later from lack of support.

The FEC “will now pretty much grind to a halt,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause. “This is a big deal that the FEC is now going to be without a quorum.”

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch suggested recently that the Supreme Court did not need to wade into the issue of partisan gerrymandering because so many states have passed reforms through the citizen initiative process that puts issues directly to voters. What Gorsuch left out is that only 24 states have a such a process. And in many of those states, legislatures are not only trying to make it harder to get issues on the ballot, they’re taking it upon themselves to reject what voters have approved — often by overwhelming majorities.

“It seems to be somewhat of an attempt to provide Republican cover to show how they’re against potential government shutdown while still voting to continue to create a government shutdown,” said Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs with Common Cause, a government watchdog. “It seems to be a political tool. If Republicans in Congress wanted to prevent a government shutdown, they could have,” he said. “They controlled all levels of government when it started.”