News Clips

Kathay Feng, Common Cause vice president for programs who was on hand for the trial, contended that Kelly’s testimony showed that the DeSantis administration was struggling to explain their actions. “There’s a lot of twisting and turning, there’s a lot of fabrication, there’s a lot of denial of history,” Feng said.

“The governor pushed and pushed and pushed,” said attorney Greg Baker who represents Common Cause Florida, the Florida branch of the NAACP and Fair Districts who are now are suing to have the map thrown out.. “He pressed his argument by sound bite bullying.” Baker, who represents the three organizations along with 10 individual voters, told a three-judge panel that DeSantis’ goal was to dismantle the district then held by Democratic Rep. Al Lawson, who is Black, and disperse it among other conservative north Florida districts easily won by white Republicans. The 2022 election left north Florida without Black representation for the first time in 30 years, Baker said. The state’s population of more than 22 million is 17% Black.

From shameful loopholes to murky transparency, Indiana lags on lobbying ethics. It's time for the Statehouse to make sure legislators spend less time enjoying steakhouse dinners from the moneyed interests who pay for them - and more time listening to their constituents.

Impeachment has generally been held for civil officers and members of the judiciary and the executive branch, said Stephen Spaulding, vice president at Common Cause, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group.  “Anything can move quickly in the Senate if senators want to,” Spaulding said.  The punishment granted in Article I, Section 5, of the Constitution has been rare: The Senate has expelled 15 members since 1789, and the 14 cases other than Blount's occurred during the Civil War for support of the Confederacy.  “It’s a high bar,” Spaulding said. 

Common Cause executive director Catherine Turcer urged the panel to start over. She insisted there’s a strong argument the newest proposal makes “zero improvement” on the current unconstitutional map. “The manipulation of district lines is the manipulation of elections,” Turcer argued. “The manipulation of elections is the manipulation of public policy.” “So at the end of the day,” she continued, “manipulating districts to favor one political party over the other manipulates all sorts of important decisions that are made at the statehouse.”

The legislation “will leave us with county and state boards that can gridlock,” said Ann Webb, the policy director for Common Cause North Carolina, which opposes the measures. “And in this political environment of hyperpartisanship, we fully expect that they will gridlock.” Ms. Webb and other critics say their concerns might have been allayed had the legislature added language to the House bill that laid out instructions to break deadlocks. But “those suggestions have been rejected,” she said. Ms. Webb said critics’ concerns go beyond squabbles over polling places to the very basics of the election process, especially in presidential politics. Already she said, some local election officials in the state initially refused to certify the results of the 2022 midterm elections because they mistrusted election procedures. It fell to local boards to address the issue. If that becomes a partisan question in 2024, she said, “we’re going to see what will feel very much to voters like chaos, and very well could be that.”