News Clips

“It’s self-serving, selective outrage,” Jay Heck, director of Common Cause of Wisconsin, a nonpartisan government watchdog group, said of impeachment. “Where was their outrage and their demands for recusal when conservatives in the past have weighed in about their values?”

“I think what you’re seeing all around the country are governors and Republican-controlled legislatures looking at what other states have done and saying, ‘Wow, look at that. We should try that here,’” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin. Heck called the threat of impeachment an overreach and described concerns about Protasiewicz’s campaign statements as “selective outrage”, given previous conservative justices’ public comments on issues before the court. Heck pointed to a 2015 case in which multiple supreme court justices who received campaign donations from the Club for Growth ruled that the conservative group had not violated campaign finance laws in its dealings with former governor Scott Walker.

Cheri Quickmire, executive director of the voter advocacy and election watchdog organization Common Cause in Connecticut, says the primary will be a test for Trump supporters and mainstream Republicans. "I don’t think he should be on the ballot," Quickmire said of DiGiovanni. "I think anyone who participated in an insurrection against the U.S. government should be disqualified."

There was a push to establish statewide initiatives, referendums and recalls during the last constitutional convention in 1978. A key proponent was the good-government organization Common Cause Hawaii. In a newspaper interview at the time, Common Cause’s Carol Zachary said special interests “can better use the established legislative process than they can the entire electorate. Their defense of the present system proves that they don’t want to give people the franchise. They’re scared of what they might do.”

The reform proposals that voters adopted during the last decade to stop gerrymandering were thwarted because redistricting remained in the hands of politicians, says Common Cause Ohio Executive Director Catherine Turcer. Now, she’s supporting a new citizen initiative that would put an independent citizen commission in charge of mapmaking. She said states that redistricted through independent citizen commissions got legislative and congressional district lines that didn’t unfairly favor one party or another. “Ohioans put good rules into the Ohio Constitution, and those rules would have been adequate if elected officials had actually followed them rather than drawing lines that favored one political party,” says Turcer. “These folks are drunk on power. What do you do with someone who is drunk? You take away their keys.” Turcer, Miller, and others who back the upcoming proposal for an independent commission say legislative maps in Arizona, California, Colorado and Michigan became more competitive after they were drawn by an independent commission.

He described Crow as a “personal friend,” according to the disclosure form, one of several from the 1990s that is no longer publicly available but was provided to The Washington Post by watchdog organizations Common Cause and Documented.