News Clips

“While the process was at times messy, it was an exercise in democracy done in public,” California Common Cause executive director Jonathan Mehta Stein said in a statement. That met the goal that his organization and others had in 2008 when they persuaded voters to take the redistricting out of the hands of public officials who had a vested interest in the outcome. This year’s effort, despite criticism, “put the California public in the driver’s seat,” he said, though the groups promised to seek improvements for the 2031 commission.

Paul S. Ryan, vice president of government watchdog Common Cause, called the revelations “a big deal.” “The importance of disclosure in this matter can’t be overstated,” Ryan told The Daily Beast. “It’s no secret that Kanye West’s candidacy would have a spoiler effect, siphoning votes from Democrat Joe Biden. Voters had a right to know that a high-powered Republican lawyer was providing legal services to Kanye—and federal law requires disclosure of such legal work.”

Paul Seamus Ryan, a campaign-law expert at Common Cause, which advocates for accountable government, said that when Trump was a candidate, it would have been illegal for him to spend his own campaign funds on legal fees. That’s because federal law prohibits candidates from spending campaign funds on personal expenses, unrelated to politics. But Ryan said no such ban applies to political parties. So the RNC can pay Trump’s legal bills, even for an investigation unconnected to his time as president. “This is an abuse of donor trust,” Ryan said. ‘I’ve been following money in politics closely for more than two decades, and I’m unaware of any similar past abuse of donor trust and donor money to pay personal legal bills of private citizens.”

Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel for public policy and government affairs at Common Cause, echoed Effingham’s take. “Conversations are really underway to find a way forward that restores the Senate as a place where senators come together, debate issues of the day and actually pass them, not bury them,” said Spaulding. “I think there is a desire — not just among Senate Democrats, among Republicans as well. The Senate is not working as well as it has in the past.” Spaulding identified a number of previous efforts around altering the filibuster while preserving a significant portion of the rule, ideas that may be considered again.

“I think there is a tremendous amount of pressure on them to deliver on voting rights," said Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel for public policy and government affairs at Common Cause.

Paul S. Ryan, vice president of litigation at campaign reform advocacy group Common Cause, said that the decision is in line with years of FEC rulemaking, and “strikes the right balance.” “The FEC’s opinion in this matter seems consistent with its handling of similar matters over the past decade-plus,” Ryan told The Daily Beast. Ryan noted that the value of a campaign’s donor list, already sky-high, may certainly appear heightened in the Schiff scenario, when the candidate stands to benefit from his own custom data. But, he said, “at the end of the day the FEC needs to draw lines in order to facilitate consistent administration of the law. And I think they’ve done an acceptable job of doing so in the context of donor lists.”