Trump Administration/Executive Ethics

No American is above the law, not even the President. But the abuses we witnessed during Donald Trump’s presidency made it very clear that Congress must strengthen the guardrails on the vast powers of our nation’s highest office. The former administration’s actions exposed and exploited a gulf between well-established norms of presidential power and the laws that govern. The Protecting Our Democracy Act will provide greater checks and balances to the powers of the presidency while creating new mechanisms for transparency and accountability.

Government watchdog Common Cause is backing the Freedom to Vote Act, introduced by the Democrats in Congress on Tuesday, which would ban removing election officials for partisan political purposes. "His Big Lie has just been metastasizing and really undermining trust in our elections in a way that is very dangerous," Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel at the organization, told AFP. But Spaulding believes the greatest remedy to electoral dark arts remains robust turnout at the ballot box. "In 2020, we had the highest voter turnout in more than a century in the middle of a pandemic, so voters really showed up," he said. "So ultimately, voters need to continue to show up in record numbers."

Constitution Day honors our founding charter, as amended. It celebrates an enduring commitment to freedom and a democracy where all of us are supposed to have an equal voice in the decisions that affect our country, no matter our ZIP code, what we look like, or how much money we have in the bank. But from its inception, the Constitution denied democracy — at times violently — to whole swaths of people: indigenous people; enslaved people; Black people; women; the unhoused; immigrants; those who do not own property — the list goes on, as does the dishonorable legacy of excluding so many for so long. Yet with vision matched by struggle, the Constitution’s dynamism — how we understand who and what it protects — has expanded. For more than two centuries, people have worked and even died for their constitutional rights. This includes heroes like Diane Nash, who led the Freedom Riders, and civil rights litigators like Justice Thurgood Marshall. New generations of leaders today continue to labor, including in the wake of deadly police violence against Black Americans, attacks on reproductive freedom, and a gutted Voting Rights Act. And it includes the late Congressman John Lewis, who was beaten by police as he marched for the freedom to vote, and who said in his final words that “democracy is not a state. It is an act.”

Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs for Common Cause, which supports the voting rights and the campaign and elections overhaul bills, said his group was ramping up in support of both measures.  “We’re continuing to mobilize and energize our thousands of activists and volunteers to do whatever it takes to get the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act this fall,” he said.

“You are not giving them a real audit at the end of the day,” Susannah Goodman, an election security expert with Common Cause, said of the GOP reviews in Arizona and elsewhere. “It’s like going to a snake oil medicine doctor and paying him a lot of money and he gives you a bottle of green goop saying this will cure your cancer.”

Today, Common Cause and over 20 non-partisan organizations working to combat voter suppression, stop online hate, and ensure all voters have an equal opportunity to participate in the political process, sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg demanding that Facebook close a loophole that has allowed former president Donald Trump to remain a regular presence on the platform despite being “banned” from it. The letter urges Zuckerberg to clearly define what content it considers to be in the voice of public figures and align its content moderation policies with campaign finance law.