News Clips

Sydney Tellez, associate state director for the progressive good-government group Common Cause New Mexico, said Friday that current safeguards against conflicts of interest border on the absurd in lower state courts. “Judges find themselves compelled to raise private funds for their election campaigns without learning the name of contributors who submit checks to the campaign treasurers,” she said. “This consistently puts them in an awkward position of holding fundraisers with a room full of potential donors, but also they are expected to turn a blind eye where the check is written and hand it to their campaign treasurer.” “Several judges have indicated to us how problematic the process is,” Tellez said.

“These bills are intentionally, horrifically, anti-voter,” Aunna Dennis, the Georgia president of the good-government group Common Cause, said in a statement. “When the 2022 election comes around, we won’t be able to vote in the ways we have used for the past 15 years—and it will be perfectly clear who’s responsible for rolling back the hands of time and returning Georgia to the Jim Crow era status quo of voter suppression.”

Sylvia Albert, director of the voting and elections program at the advocacy group Common Cause, said the proposal threatens the autonomy of the judicial branch. “It is a warning to judges that if you don’t vote the way we want, we will expel you,” she said. “It is basically an attempt to eliminate the balance of powers among the three branches of government.”

"Those who won the election, who have the majority are going to be faced with a choice: do they protect voting rights or do they protect the filibuster rule?" said Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel for public policy & senior adviser at Common Cause. "I don't think saying, 'Oh, but the filibuster,' is going to cut it." As for what Mr. Biden can do, the Brennan Center for Justice wrote in October 2020 that the president could improve cybersecurity and direct more federal agencies to offer voter registration. Spaulding said that the president could also provide more resources for the Justice Department to enforce the Voting Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act and other voting rights legislation. He applauded the White House for supporting the bill and said the administration needs to "really use the bully pulpit" to help pass legislation.

Common Cause Georgia Executive Director Aunna Dennis said the bills in the Legislature would roll back broad improvements in voting accessibility. “We have made so many good gains, actually, in Georgia when it came to access to the ballot, and now we see so many attacks,” she said.

Supreme Court justices would face a code of conduct in the bill that would institute new transparency and ethics rules.  It’s currently “the only federal court that is not bound by the judicial code of conduct,” said Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel of public policy and government affairs for Common Cause, which backs the overhaul.