News Clips

Pennsylvania since 2019 doesn’t require an excuse for voting by mail. But the state is unable to provide results instantly because it doesn’t have enough people and other resources to handle the process, said Khalif Ali, executive director of Common Cause in Pennsylvania, a group supporting voting rights.

The courts should be above partisan politics, said Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, a good government group. Voters shouldn’t assume that a Republican majority will mean that big business will always win or that a Democratic majority will favor labor unions. “At the end of the day we want these courts to be independent and impartial and not be caught up in partisan elections,” she said. “And now we have the party labels, so that makes it different.” Since Brunner and Kennedy are sitting Supreme Court justices, people can make comparisons based on how they ruled in cases, Turcer said. “There are things that people can compare and contrast,” Turcer said. “It’s incredibly important for all of us to pay attention to the Ohio Supreme court because of voting rights, redistricting and mapmaking and because of the rights for women to make choices.”

Former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal, representing Common Cause in the case, told the court the opponents’ arguments “hang on a hyper-literal reading of the word ‘Legislature’ that ignores that word’s context, constitutional structure, and precedent,” adding, “the original understanding of ‘Legislature’ … contemplated a governing body defined and bounded by state constitutional limits.” It’s hard to have much confidence that such originalist arguments will persuade the court’s self-described originalists.

“We’ve seen this movie before. We know how it ends. Skip to appointment of special master who is familiar with New York immediately and stop wasting New Yorkers time and money with a useless bipartisan commission that defaults to the Legislature,” Susan Lerner, executive director of the good government group Common Cause New York, said in a statement.

Reasons for these violations range from lawmakers "being sloppy to just not caring about stock disclosure," said Aaron Scherb of nonpartisan government reform group Common Cause.

Law professor Michele Goodwin shared the 2011 article from The Los Angeles Times on Twitter on Monday and tagged Common Cause, the watchdog group that initially reported on Thomas' failure to disclose his wife's income from the Heritage Foundation. Retweeting Goodwin, Common Cause wrote: "We reviewed Justice Thomas' financial disclosure filings years ago and found that he failed to disclose his wife's income ($686,589) from the Heritage Foundation. We'll keep calling out Ginni Thomas until we have an ethical Supreme Court."