Legislative Ethics

“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.

Bob Phillips, director of Common Cause North Carolina, said court oversight is important. He noted that every election here in the last decade was held using Republican-drawn maps that were later ruled unconstitutional, for either racial or partisan gerrymandering. “We feel strongly that the state courts should not be taken out of the equation,” Phillips said in a media briefing this month. His briefing, as well as Holder’s, focused mostly on turning the national media’s attention toward the North Carolina case. Reporters for outlets like CNN, NBC, CBS and Politico attended. Kathay Feng, who leads Common Cause’s national redistricting efforts, said it’s not only Republican-led states that gerrymander their congressional maps. She pointed to New York and Maryland as examples of Democratic gerrymandering.

Aaron Scherb, legislative affairs director at Common Cause, a government watchdog group that backed the Democratic bill, dismissed the amendment effort as a “pure ‘gotcha’ moment” by Republicans. “It’s already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, which House Judiciary Republicans all know,” he said via email.

Elections expert Sylvia Albert of Common Cause predicted the scenario is inevitable: "We will see somebody who denies the 2020 election win office. We will."

“What’s at stake is really our American notion of what it means to have a responsive and participatory democracy,” Kathay Feng, national redistricting director for Common Cause, said. “The question is, how important is that to us? Because this one theory would threaten to dismantle those fundamental principles.” Common Cause North Carolina and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice have launched a statewide tour — holding town halls in all 100 counties — to build a movement against the case. Riggs, who will argue the case before the Supreme Court this fall, doesn’t want people to feel defeated. She believes the case is winnable.

“This process could have worked,” said Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio. “It should have worked, and we have constitutional officers who have refused to actually follow what Ohio voters have put in the (state) constitution.” “You’re talking about these folks, they’re drunk on power,” Turcer said. “And when people are drunk, what do you do? You take away their car keys.” ... “What is super clear to me is that the Ohio Constitution gives us the opportunity to tackle change if the state legislature is not willing to do so,” Turcer said.