News Clips

Lobbyists in Nebraska raked in more cash than ever last year and more people joined their ranks to try to influence public officials, according to a new report. Lobbyists collected $19.4 million in gross earnings in 2019, according to Common Cause Nebraska. The government watchdog group said the total is a record, up from $17.8 million in 2018. Jack Gould, the group’s issues chairman, said lobbyists are getting more involved in campaign

The Trump campaign is obfuscating its spending thanks to a loophole that the FEC has failed to close. Unlike payments to credit card companies, which must be itemized by individual vendor, payments to consultants who then outsource the work do not have to be broken out, said Paul Ryan, a campaign finance lawyer with Common Cause. “The lack of transparency to the public is a problem,” he said.

However, Common Cause Pennsylvania is claiming the lawsuit is a “political ploy” designed “to remove specific voters from the voter rolls.” “Our job with Common Cause is to make sure this doesn't turn into a democracy crisis with people who should be able to show up and vote on Election Day being removed,” Suzanne Almedia, the interim executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, told Fox News. “This is about the process that an eligible voter would go through if they're purged from the rolls mistakenly."

Democrats and voting rights groups contend they simply want to protect the voting rights of all citizens, and note that repeated studies have found no widespread fraud and no partisan benefit to expanded voting. “It’s an uninformed political calculation that certain elected Republican officials are making,” said Aaron Scherb of Common Cause.

Noting that the initial draft of the PPP did not have that “carve-in” for chains, Common Cause’s Beth Rotman, an expert in money and politics, told the Daily Beast, “Essentially a combination of wealthy special interests together with well-placed contributors at a critical moment bought a revision to our stimulus package that defined small business as including big business because they owned large franchises made up of hundreds of smaller entities. They were following the law they helped write.” 

Can the election be postponed? The experts say it cannot, "No laws passed by Congress have delegated these powers to the president, even in an emergency, so Congress is the only entity that has the power to change the date of the election," noted Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause.