Disclosure & Transparency

Supreme Court justices would face a code of conduct in the bill that would institute new transparency and ethics rules.  It’s currently “the only federal court that is not bound by the judicial code of conduct,” said Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel of public policy and government affairs for Common Cause, which backs the overhaul.  

“The relationship between elected officials and constituents is intended to be a dialogue and not a one way street,’’ said Common Cause Florida Executive Director Anjenys Gonzalez-Eilert at a news conference last week.

In the 2020 election, we used our vote, whether it was cast early, by mail or on Election Day, to determine the future for our family, community and country. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, racial injustice and the confusion and sudden changes to the voting process thrown at us, we showed up and decided the outcome of a free and fair election. Now, after showing our power as voters, some partisan politicians in state legislatures are pushing bills that would restrict our freedom to vote, while Congress is on the verge of passing laws to protect and strengthen it.

This week the House of Representatives is poised to vote on H.R. 1, the "For the People Act." The bill's marquee provisions to protect the freedom to vote, end gerrymandering, and reduce the undue influence of money in the political process have received well-deserved attention. It is a transformative bill. The For The People Act would set fair, baseline standards to reverse the coordinated, Republican-led state efforts to restrict voting at the state level. More than 250 such restrictive bills have already been filed or carried over in state legislatures this year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice - part of a partisan backlash to the historic turnout in 2020 when Americans, especially Black and Brown voters, showed up in record numbers in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic. But like any comprehensive bill, there is far more than meets the eye. The bill has numerous other provisions to bolster and strengthen democracy. Here are just a few.

We now have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to pass a new law, based on countless democracy reforms passed and successfully implemented in states across the country, the For the People Act. The bill, which will go to a vote of the full House the first week in March, includes provisions that will end secret, unaccountable money in politics, help ensure every voter, regardless of their race, ethnicity, age, or ZIP code, has equal access to the ballot box, end partisan gerrymandering, and strengthen conflict of interest and ethics laws for public officials. The For the People Act, designated as H.R. 1 and S. 1 in Congress, is the most comprehensive pro-democracy bill introduced in Congress since the Watergate era. It is the bold action that the American people want and deserve. 

According to Common Cause Senior Counsel Stephen Spaulding, the implications of not getting H.R. 1 passed could be extremely serious. Spaulding, who helped write H.R. 1 while serving as Senior Elections Counsel to the Committee on House Administration, warned that the damage Republicans could inflict on democracy in the absence of federal action could be irreparable. “For democracy in general, the danger of not taking action is potentially catastrophic, given the precision and targeting and manipulation of the rules that some state legislators are doing to make it harder to vote,” he said. Spaulding explained that Republican efforts to restrict voting took off after the Supreme Court’s decision inShelby County v. Holder, which invalidated the 1965 Voting Rights Act’s requirement for states with a history of racial discrimination to submit changes in voting rules to the Justice Department for pre-clearance. But he added that establishing uniform standards for voting across all 50 states would not have a partisan tilt one way or another. Until Trump started attacking the validity of postal ballots, Republicans had made use of them in greater numbers than Democrats in many key states. “Ever since then, we know that there are elected officials at the state level who have been working tooth and nail to make it harder to vote, so this is an opportunity to really level the playing field,” he said. “I think these are basic, common-sense solutions to make voting more convenient no matter what party you’re in…. We just had the most the highest turnout election… in the middle of a global pandemic, and that’s because people took steps across the country to make voting more convenient. Now we need to lock those in.”