News Clips

“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.

When I called up Catherine Turcer on Tuesday, she mentioned that her daughter had just sent her a text message saying it must feel like she’s living the same day over and over again. Turcer is the executive director of the Ohio chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group, and one of the most knowledgeable people about redistricting in her state. Earlier that morning, the Ohio supreme court struck down the map for the state’s 15 congressional districts, saying they were so distorted in favor of Republicans that they violated the state constitution. It was the seventh time this year the court has struck down either a congressional or state legislative map this year (it has struck down the congressional map twice and state legislative districts five times). Turcer and I have spoken several times over the last few months as the saga in Ohio has unfolded, and she is not someone who sugar coats things. I’ve been interested in her perspective as someone who was initially optimistic about the reforms – she fought to pass them – but has seen the reality of how Republicans have brazenly ignored them this year. “It’s incredibly painful to participate in elections that you know are rigged,” she told me. “I’ve been encouraging folks to look at the upcoming elections as important to participate because if we do just opt out, we would have even worse representation.”

Dan Vicuña is the national redistricting manager at Common Cause, a national organization focused on expansive voting rights and government accountability. Derek Muller is the Bouma Fellow of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law, where he teaches on topics related to election law and federal courts. They took some time to talk about the concerns around cases like “Moore v. Harper,” whether the 1965 Voting Rights Act offers sufficient protections to these efforts to concentrate elections power among legislators, and the harm caused by gerrymandering.

"The election would have looked very different," if the Supreme Court had embraced the legal theory the North Carolina lawmakers are pushing, said Suzanne Almeida, redistricting and representation counsel for Common Cause. "The scariest piece is that this is a fundamental reimagining of the relationship between state courts, state constitutions and state legislatures that is more likely to undermine the will of the people being upheld."

Recent headlines, from the January 6th Select Committee’s hearings to the Supreme Court rolling back the right to reproductive healthcare, profoundly implicate the freedom that many will celebrate this Independence Day. Opponents of democracy — a system that works best when it empowers people to have an equal say in decisions that affect their futures — have waged a well-coordinated attack on it. Freedom must be fortified, it must be protected at the ballot box, and it must never be taken for granted.