Legislative Ethics

Aaron Scherb Common Cause Director, Legislative Affairs: Scherb co-led an umbrella advocacy group made up of 240 organizations to push for passage of the For the People Act, a comprehensive voting-rights package that Republicans opposed.

“It takes us in the wrong direction. It’s another way to confuse voters to put additional obstacles in their way,” Common Cause Indiana executive director Julia Vaughn told The Daily Beast.

Suzanne Almeida of Common Cause, a frequent litigant opposing gerrymanders, noted that courts in Republican states like Ohio have joined ones in deep Democratic states like New York in striking down partisan maps. “If I ran the world,” Almeida said, there’d be national standards against gerrymandering to ensure skewed maps in one big state don’t tilt the entire congressional map. But a Democratic proposal for just that foundered in Congress earlier this year. So, Almeida said, ”we are taking the wins that we can take.”

“We see some of the most bare-knuckled fights over political power at the local level,” said Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director of Common Cause, a government watchdog organization. “Plenty of people have tried creatively to get their way with the commission,” in California, Feng said. “But selecting a group of people who are savvy and listening for exactly that kind of thing makes them well inoculated to those lobbying efforts.”

“They’re lying, and they know we know they’re lying,” says Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, one of several non-partisan groups fighting for redistricting reform. Following the April 4 contempt hearing in the Ohio Supreme Court, Mia Lewis, associate director of Common Cause Ohio, told Spectrum News that the Republican strategy for the last year has been to run out the clock. “They said, ‘Oh, it was impossible to meet that (court) deadline.’ Well, yes, if you’re trying to make it impossible by stalling and wasting time.”

“It’s really outrageous on a number of fronts,” said Beth Rotman, money in politics and ethics program director at Common Cause, a national group that promotes government accountability. “This ethics agency has a job to do for everyday Americans,” Rotman said. “They have a job to do for we the people who have these laws in place, and they have a job to do and if there has been any potential issue they need to investigate, they need to be able to start to do their jobs and go forward with this without potential retribution, which is what this looks like from here.”