News Clips

"Even if this administrator isn't violating any law, it can certainly look bad if she's not performing her duties that taxpayers are funding her to do and often the perception can be just as harmful and it can call into question that public servants should be serving the public interests, not minding their own pockets," said Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, a non-partisan government watchdog nonprofit.

Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, a watchdog group, said Mr. Adams never should have hesitated in deciding to release his tax returns. “This is not a gotcha question from the press — this is the sort of thing that real people on the street pay attention to,” she said. “The mayor shouldn’t be playing cat and mouse with something that should be an obvious transparency measure.”

“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.”

“I think we’ve now saw sort of a crack or a fissure in what has been sort of a tradition of Republican commissioners acting as a bloc and citing prosecutorial discretion, vagueness of the law, and a whole host of rationales for their refusals to move forward on any sort of enforcement,” said Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel at Common Cause. Spaulding previously worked as a senior aide for a former Democratic FEC commissioner. But Friday’s decision will not end dark money entirely, Spaulding notes. “For super PACs, there’s still plenty of ways for dark money to infect the system,” he said. “This doesn’t wave a magic wand,” he continued, citing nonprofit groups, trade associations and other differently incorporated LLCs that could continue to evade heightened disclosure requirements.

“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.”

“This is a problem for New Yorkers who will confront a ballot that does not reflect the reality of the field, and may end up throwing away their vote on a candidate who is not running for office,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause/NY. “It’s simply unfair and wrong to present the voters with a false choice.”