This response to Watergate was not inevitable. Reform depended on the establishment or expansion of a robust network of organizations, including Common Cause and Congress Watch. Those organizations insisted that legislation creating stronger checks on the executive branch, strengthening Congress and imposing laws to make it easier to hold officials accountable were the only ways to check bad behavior. ...

The problems that the Jan. 6 report highlights are different in nature from the problems during Watergate. Though addressing...

Susan Lerner, the executive director of the government reform group Common Cause, called on Mr. Santos to step down and urged the bipartisan Office of Congressional Ethics and federal prosecutors to investigate.

Voting rights advocates are mulling whether to mount another dauntingly expensive ballot initiative to make the commitment to nonpartisan maps ironclad, said Catherine Turcer, the executive director of Common Cause Ohio.

And the bar to success might get even higher. Republican legislators proposed a constitutional amendment last month that would raise the threshold for voter approval of constitutional changes to 60 percent of the vote, from the current simple majority.

Republicans call it a move “to safeguard...

When the court closed the doors of federal courts to claims of partisan gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the five most conservative members of the court, said state courts could continue to hear such cases — including in the context of congressional redistricting.

“Our conclusion does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering,” he wrote. “Nor does our conclusion condemn complaints about districting to echo into a void. The states, for example, are actively...

During the oral arguments, Neal Katyal, an attorney for the Common Cause organization, brought up past remarks that the Supreme Court made in the Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board case.

"And Justice Thomas, it's the same point picking up on Justice Kavanaugh's questioning. Palm Beach, the court said that sovereignty was at its apex when talking about state constitutions and interpretations by state courts," Katyal said. "This Court never second-guessed state interpretations of their own constitutions."

Chief Justice John Roberts implicitly ruled out support for the theory in a landmark 2019 decision, Rucho v. Common Cause, which stated that partisan gerrymanders were political matters outside the purview of federal courts.

“Provisions in state statutes and state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply” in outlawing partisan maps, he wrote, citing a voter-approved amendment to the Florida Constitution that forbids maps drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party.

“It is rare to encounter a constitutional theory so antithetical to the Constitution’s text and structure, so inconsistent with the Constitution’s original meaning, so disdainful of this Court’s precedent, and so potentially damaging for American democracy,” lawyers for Common Cause and the other non-state parties said in their brief.

The last two items are critically important for our freedoms and the health of our democracy. The January 6th Select Committee’s forthcoming report is expected to highlight the former president’s role in fomenting a deadly insurrection and provide recommendations to ensure we have peaceful transfers of power between administrations.

The Electoral Count Act revisions are consequential because they would modernize a law passed in 1887. Updating this antiquated law could help prevent another insurrection and attempted coup.

“When an elected official runs for another public office, it doesn’t, in any way, absolve them from complying with freedom of information requests or public information requests,” said Aaron Scherb, the legislative affairs director for Common Cause, a national nonpartisan group that advocates for government transparency. “Public officials work on the taxpayers’ dime. And it’s important that citizens can get the transparency and accountability that they deserve from their elected officials at all times.”

Kathay Feng, who leads anti-gerrymandering efforts for the national group Common Cause, calls it “the case of the century” — and not out of admiration.

“It is a case that asserts a bizarre and fabricated reading of the United States Constitution ... to create a situation where elections are already rigged from the start,” she said.