News Clips

"No American is above the law, including former presidents and their advisers," Aaron Scherb, senior director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, said in a statement. "Steve Bannon learned that today through a jail sentence and a fine for defying a subpoena from the January 6th Committee." "It is imperative that Congress have subpoena power with teeth in order to fulfill its oversight and investigatory responsibilities," Scherb added. "If individuals could defy congressional subpoenas with impunity, our system of checks and balances would break down."

“Our government will be run by and for the politicians, not the people,” said Suzanne Almeida, Common Cause’s director of state operations, during a Wednesday conference call with reporters. “The danger is not just that partisan political leaders will handpick winners and losers … It’s that we the people will no longer have a fully representative government.”

The courts should be above partisan politics, said Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, a good government group. Voters shouldn’t assume that a Republican majority will mean that big business will always win or that a Democratic majority will favor labor unions. “At the end of the day we want these courts to be independent and impartial and not be caught up in partisan elections,” she said. “And now we have the party labels, so that makes it different.” Since Brunner and Kennedy are sitting Supreme Court justices, people can make comparisons based on how they ruled in cases, Turcer said. “There are things that people can compare and contrast,” Turcer said. “It’s incredibly important for all of us to pay attention to the Ohio Supreme court because of voting rights, redistricting and mapmaking and because of the rights for women to make choices.”

Bob Phillips, director of Common Cause North Carolina, said court oversight is important. He noted that every election here in the last decade was held using Republican-drawn maps that were later ruled unconstitutional, for either racial or partisan gerrymandering. “We feel strongly that the state courts should not be taken out of the equation,” Phillips said in a media briefing this month. His briefing, as well as Holder’s, focused mostly on turning the national media’s attention toward the North Carolina case. Reporters for outlets like CNN, NBC, CBS and Politico attended. Kathay Feng, who leads Common Cause’s national redistricting efforts, said it’s not only Republican-led states that gerrymander their congressional maps. She pointed to New York and Maryland as examples of Democratic gerrymandering.

On Sunday, Common Cause president Karen Hobert Flynn told MSNBC that in the hands of Republicans, a second constitutional convention could "put all of our constitutional rights up for grabs."

“What’s at stake is really our American notion of what it means to have a responsive and participatory democracy,” Kathay Feng, national redistricting director for Common Cause, said. “The question is, how important is that to us? Because this one theory would threaten to dismantle those fundamental principles.” Common Cause North Carolina and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice have launched a statewide tour — holding town halls in all 100 counties — to build a movement against the case. Riggs, who will argue the case before the Supreme Court this fall, doesn’t want people to feel defeated. She believes the case is winnable.