News Clips

“Now I’m elected, now I’m in, I got the power to draft, lobby and shape the laws that govern the United States of America. Fabulous,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Now, is there any hard limit that I have in terms of what legislation I’m allowed to touch…based on the special interests funds that I accepted?” “There’s no limit,” said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of the nonpartisan watchdog group Common Cause. Ocasio-Cortzed continued, “I can be totally funded by oil and gas, totally funded by big pharma and come in and write pharma laws?” “That’s right,” Hobert Flynn said. Wrapping up, Ocasio-Cortez then added, “We have a system that is fundamentally broken.”

"Mr. Whitley has no business being involved with elections, much less serving as Texas' chief election officer," Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, said in a written statement. Common Cause is among the groups that have asked Whitley to withdraw his office's Jan. 25 advisory. "This 'voter purge' was poorly thought out, incompetently implemented and definitely seems to have been more about politics than anything else," he said. "At this point, I think purging Mr. Whitley from the secretary of state's office would be the single best thing we could do for voting rights in Texas."

“Money has too much influence on our political system,” said Rey Lopez-Calderon, the executive director of California Common Cause. “Every year we see the lobbying spending increase is a year we risk disenfranchising more voters and silencing the voices of ordinary citizens.”

The president's well-documented lies and exaggerations are disturbing and unprecedented, but when he openly ignores and ridicules the findings of the U.S. intelligence community, he puts American lives at risk, diminishes our role in the world, and makes us all less safe.

“It’s really just a system of self-policing,” said Julia Vaughn, policy director of Common Cause Indiana, a government watchdog group. “Obviously, the individuals have widely varying abilities to police this . . . widely varying in their sensitivity to what constitutes a conflict or not. In their mind, they’re protecting the institution in that way,” Vaughn added. “I think, long term, just the opposite happens. The institution is hurt when we constantly have these kinds of situations when everybody outside the statehouse seems to see a conflict of interest, but nobody inside the statehouse can see it.”

“It seems to be somewhat of an attempt to provide Republican cover to show how they’re against potential government shutdown while still voting to continue to create a government shutdown,” said Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs with Common Cause, a government watchdog. “It seems to be a political tool. If Republicans in Congress wanted to prevent a government shutdown, they could have,” he said. “They controlled all levels of government when it started.”