News Clips

“The relationship between elected officials and constituents is intended to be a dialogue and not a one way street,’’ said Common Cause Florida Executive Director Anjenys Gonzalez-Eilert at a news conference last week.

“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.

Voting is, of course, the first step in democracy reform. But getting meaningful positive change requires so much more. Citizen involvement, working together, demanding to be informed, organizing on the issues, getting commitments from candidates, and then holding them accountable, is more demanding. Yet it is the price of democracy.Will we pay that price? We are paying dearly now for things that disserve our country, so maybe nourishing the roots of self-government isn’t such a heavy price to pay after all. This is the year of decision. We have the opportunity now in 2020 to put America on course to what it can and should be. Let’s seize the opportunity — while we still have it.

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 ranks of Washington’s policy experts and influencers run deep, but these are the players who stand out for delivering results for their clients in the halls of Congress and the administration. Grassroots: Karen Hobert Flynn and Aaron Scherb, Common Cause