News Clips

Republicans appear to have cynically calculated that these “ballot security” measures to suppress the vote may be harmful to some of their own voters, but that it will block  more Wisconsinites who might vote for their political opponents.  Republicans have targeted voters who reside in urban areas like Milwaukee, Madison, Racine and Green Bay. They have also homed in on college and university students by making it more difficult for that population to vote, even with a college-issued photo ID, than almost anywhere else in the nation. Most cruelly, Republicans have targeted Wisconsinites with disabilities, the elderly and the poor who must rely on public transportation and don’t have or cannot easily obtain the required photo ID needed to vote in Wisconsin. Republicans have not always behaved like this in Wisconsin. The question now is when, or even if, they will come to their senses and abandon this vicious assault on the very essence of our being as Americans, a promise that has made this state and this nation a beacon of  freedom and hope in the world: our 233-year-old commitment to free and fair elections.

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.

Beth Rotman, national director of money in politics and ethics at watchdog Common Cause, told CNBC that new ethics laws governing Supreme Court justices should require them to disclose more details of their spouses’ consulting contracts. “Disclosure must be robust for it to be truly meaningful in this context so financial disclosures should include consulting contracts. As you have seen already, when justices complete their annual reports, they list information that does not give a complete view of their spouse’s financial ties,” Rotman said in an email. “It is key to meaningful disclosure that the rules be updated to include the source and amount of any spouse’s consulting contracts over a reasonable minimum threshold.”

In 2009, Ginni Thomas founded a “tea party” nonprofit called Liberty Central to help defeat President Barack Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act. She raised $550,000 from undisclosed donors to fund it. This prompted the nonprofit Common Cause to call on Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case challenging limits on corporate political spending. He did not. Further investigation by Common Cause revealed that Clarence Thomas had failed to disclose the $686,589 salary his wife earned from the conservative Heritage Foundation, a major opponent of Obama’s health care law, from 2003-2007.

“Given how quickly Senator Collins and Senator Murkowski called on then-Senator Franken to resign after the story came out about his sexual harassment, sexual assault, I think they’ll be under that much more scrutiny,” said Aaron Scherb with Common Cause. “There are so many unanswered questions about Professor Ford and this sexual abuse from several decades ago. We believe that needs to come out,” Scherb said.

Well, conservatives have had their sights set on these limits for a long time. According to Paul Seamus Ryan from Common Cause, two contributions-limits cases currently have certiorari petitions before the Supreme Court, one from Montana and the other from Texas. “Both jurisdictions’ limits were upheld by the circuit courts—and the plaintiffs/petitioners in both cases are asking the Supreme Court to hear their cases and declare the challenged contribution limits unconstitutional,” Ryan told me Wednesday.