Abuse of Power

Today, Common Cause Florida and the League of Women Voters of Florida filed suit seeking a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction to remove Gov. Rick Scott from any role in the recount of the 2018 Florida General Election. The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida Tallahassee Division.

Stephen Spaulding, director of strategy at the nonprofit watchdog group Common Cause, said that there is a “real pent-up need for oversight” and that Democrats now have an obligation to do the work that outside organizations have largely been doing over the past two years through actions such as Freedom of Information Act requests. “It’s about following the evidence, asking tough questions,” Spaulding said. “It truly is about accountability. We’ve had two years with one party controlling both houses of Congress and, in some cases, actively undermining investigations. There’s a backlog of answers; at the same time, there has to be a smart and strategic approach.”

“When we talk about holding power accountable, that means no one is above the law,” Annastacia Belladonna-Carrera, executive director of Common Cause Minnesota, told the crowd. “That requires justice to not just be blind, but nonpartisan. We the people are the ultimate power within our democracy.”

Tonight, in hundreds of cities and towns across the nation, hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets in protest to defend Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russia’s attacks on the 2016 presidential race. Protesters demanded that the investigation proceed without interference and stressed that acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker immediately recuse himself from overseeing the investigation in light of his own conflicts of interest.

Whoever becomes the next Attorney General of the United States -- whether acting or permanent -- must make a public commitment not to interfere in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

“It’s indicative of a pattern with this administration,” said David Vance, a spokesman for Common Cause, a civil rights group that helped recruit 6,500 volunteers to monitor polling locations across the country Tuesday. “It’s an effort to intimidate voters and keep them away from the polls and try to dictate which voters will turn out and which voters won’t. It flies in the face of what the DOJ has done traditionally to protect voters.” ...Said Vance, of Common Cause: “To turn out and make yourself heard is the primary weapon to combat these attempts to suppress the vote.”