Disclosure & Transparency

“This provision helps ensure President Trump and his family can’t benefit from coronavirus pandemic, but there are some loopholes,” said Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, an advocacy group that works closely with House committee staffers. “They could benefit in indirect ways.”

Congress’s revised Coronavirus emergency response package provides critical funds to address our public health crisis, offers a lifeline to struggling Americans, and makes a significant down payment toward safeguarding our democracy. Every American expects and deserves to have their vote counted and their voice heard in our democracy, and the $400 million in election funding for states and localities is a step in the right direction. That total is nearly triple what Senate Republicans proposed in their initial bill. However, given the recent health crisis, states and localities immediately need significantly more resources to make critical investments to ensure that all voters can participate in free, fair, orderly, and safe elections this year, or else millions of voters could be disenfranchised. These resources need to be made available as soon as possible to prepare for the health and safety concerns around upcoming primaries and general elections while offering all feasible methods of voting to give voters the chance to participate in the election.

As public officials at every level of government wrestle with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, including implementation of social distancing measures that impact the public’s ability to attend government meetings and other proceedings, Common Cause encourages public officials to adopt emergency measures to protect public health while maximizing transparency and remote public participation and limiting government business to priority functions necessary under the current emergency conditions.

Democracy reform, driven by the people, is on the march in states and municipalities across the nation where scores of pro-democracy reforms have been enacted. But democracy reform remains stalled in the U.S. Senate where the Republican majority ignores the will of the people. Sunday will mark one year since the U.S. House of Representatives passed its sweeping and transformative package of pro-democracy reforms in the For the People Act, or H.R. 1.

We showed these tax records to Paul Seamus Ryan of the watchdog group Common Cause. "When casinos are giving money to one of these groups right before an election that the casino has a vested interest in, the governor's race, and then the DGA or the RGA spends the money in that race, that's a pretty clear connection."

“He had the wealth to give away money for years to build friends, to build political allies, to build relationships, in ways that the average American doesn’t have, can’t do. That’s a huge advantage,” said Paul S. Ryan, a vice president at Common Cause, a government watchdog group.