News Clips

Aaron Scherb Common Cause Director, Legislative Affairs: Scherb co-led an umbrella advocacy group made up of 240 organizations to push for passage of the For the People Act, a comprehensive voting-rights package that Republicans opposed.

“They’re lying, and they know we know they’re lying,” says Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, one of several non-partisan groups fighting for redistricting reform. Following the April 4 contempt hearing in the Ohio Supreme Court, Mia Lewis, associate director of Common Cause Ohio, told Spectrum News that the Republican strategy for the last year has been to run out the clock. “They said, ‘Oh, it was impossible to meet that (court) deadline.’ Well, yes, if you’re trying to make it impossible by stalling and wasting time.”

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.

“If we can say only legislatures are able to make laws regarding the time, place, manner of elections, and courts don’t have any ability to change or constrain those laws, we’re really looking at a significant change in the balance of power between the three branches of state governments, as well as the level of intervention from federal courts in state lawmaking,” said Suzanne Almeida, redistricting counsel for Common Cause, a nonpartisan nonprofit involved in both the North Carolina and Pennsylvania cases.

"The elimination of state autonomy is inconsistent with the historical practice and the intent of the Election Clause and invites the risk that federal courts will wrongly interpret state law -- a significant risk given the difficulty federal courts have in mastering 50 different States' laws," Allison Riggs, a lawyer for Common Cause, argued in court papers. She said to accept the Republicans' argument "that partisan gerrymandering claims are immune from state constitutional scrutiny by state courts would require this Court to overrule a century of precedent." "It would lead to an unprecedented upheaval of current election law and foreclose any legal relief for voters from extreme legislation, which state courts already found to be undemocratic," Riggs said in an interview.