News Clips

Time-tested grassroots organizations, such as Common Cause, dominate much of the space with expenses of less than $20 million each year. Common Cause, for instance, couples a D.C. strategy with chapters in 30 states and millions of grassroots members working to champion a panoply of efforts to strengthen democracy, involving voting, ethics, accountability, and other matters. Now imagine if their budgets were $100 million. Their membership could expand across all 50 states, and they could win policies that would reduce corruption that much faster. They could establish pipelines to pass institutional knowledge from one generation to the next. For the first time in years, these groups could stop worrying about whether each program they start will shutter one year later from lack of support.

The ranks of Washington’s policy experts and influencers run deep, but these are the players who stand out for delivering results for their clients in the halls of Congress and the administration. Grassroots: Karen Hobert Flynn and Aaron Scherb, Common Cause

The political maps of the past decade have favored rural voters, said Common Cause North Carolina Executive Director Bob Phillips. Rural voters tend to support Republicans, and the maps were drawn to cement Republicans’ power. Plus, he said, many of North Carolina’s most powerful lawmakers are from rural areas themselves. Phillips, who is an advocate for redistricting reform, said he is still trying to convince Republican leaders like them to pass reforms in the next few months, before the 2020 elections. In part, he said, he pitches it as an insurance policy for Republicans in case Democrats do win in 2020. Without reforms to take politics out of the process, Phillips said, Democrats could draw new maps that benefit urban voters as much as the current maps benefit rural voters. “I sometimes talk to those lawmakers and say, ‘The pendulum swings,’” Phillips said. “‘You all know that. And you do not want to ... be left out, potentially, if the pendulum were to swing back.’”

"To Majority Leader McConnell, we ask: why are you afraid of all Americans having their full right to vote?" Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause, said in a statement.

Two more House Republicans have announced their retirement, adding to over a dozen House Republicans that will not be seeking re-election in 2020. Suzanne Almeida from the Common Cause Redistricting Counsel explains what role redistricting may have played in their decision.

Common Cause hand-delivered a list of nine possible articles — including one outlining how Trump illicitly profited off the presidency — to all House members late last month. “Not including expanded articles … gives a green light for future presidents that these abuses can go unpunished,” said Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, which works closely with staff of House committees.