Abuse of Power

On January 6, 2021, the American people witnessed a violent insurrection on live television. Tonight, we learned beyond a shadow of a doubt that the insurrection was planned, promoted, and pushed by Donald Trump and his cronies in an attempt to steal the election and ignore the will of the American people. The bipartisan committee laid out evidence gathered by non-partisan career investigators revealing the vast scope of the criminal conspiracy to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election. It was a wide-ranging and premeditated plot that began weeks before the deadly attack on the Capitol by a racist mob.

“Once the fuel has been added to the fire, it’s very hard to back away from it,” said Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director for the advocacy group Common Cause. “Now it’s not just the operatives in the back room, which is where it started. It’s not just technology. It’s not just legislators being shameless about drawing lines. It’s governors and state officials and sometimes even courts leaning in to affirm these egregious gerrymanders.”

Today, the Justice Department indicted former Trump White House official Peter Navarro for contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the January 6th Select Committee. The former trade adviser was a leader in the Trump White House effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In April, Common Cause urged House Members to vote to certify criminal contempt citations against Navarro and fellow White House official Dan Scavino.

"All the other actors have been held accountable, but still no accountability for former president Trump," the government watchdog group Common Cause — which had filed a complaint against AMI, the publisher of the National Enquirer — said in a statement last year.

Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of advocacy organization Common Cause Texas, said the large number of elections in recent years, even just this month for example, doesn’t make it any easier — or less confusing — for Texas voters to turn up to the polls. “For us in Texas, you gotta think about who are the people that are gonna turn out to this election, which is one of… two elections just in the month of May,” Gutierrez said. “That’s just crazy,” he added. “We were getting so many people asking what this election was for, because we just had an election literally a few weeks ago. It’s just like only the very most engaged people, who also are usually like the most partisan in each party, electing candidates.”

“The current maps are often pointed to, ‘Oh, look how terrible they are.’ But they are drafted to give specific communities a fair chance to choose their own representatives,” said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, an advocacy group which opposed the new map. She noted that a special master appointed by a federal court had drawn the previous congressional map, and said that he had taken these demographic factors into account. ... “People do not live, work and play in neat lines and boxes. So if you’re actually going to reflect the lived reality of communities, your lines are not going to be as pretty, but they will be realistic,” Lerner told The New Republic.