Common Blog

They turned democracy and our Constitution inside out in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday afternoon and nobody even flinched. Senators voted 54-46 in FAVOR of legislation to close a legal loophole that lets thousands of gun purchasers, including criminals and people with a history of mental illness, evade a background check that might prevent them [...]

At the beginning of this legislative session, Common Cause Hawaii and 13 other local organizations asked new leadership in both houses to rein in various abuses of the legislative process by promulgating new legislative rules that would increase transparency and public confidence in the legislature. Based on results, we can assume that applying improved legislative [...]

This essay was prepared for Common Cause’s “Lessons of Watergate” conference, March 13 -14, 2013 at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C. Common Cause was less than one month old when it first showed up on Richard Nixon’s radar screen. An entry in White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman’s diary forSept. 20, 1970reports that [...]

Shut it down, Mr. President. Organizing for Action, the Obama administration’s new “independent,” non-profit advocacy group, should be put out of business and its plan to schedule quarterly meetings with the President for its big contributors and fundraisers should be scrapped. “Access to the President should never be for sale,” Common Cause said in a [...]

I know I shouldn’t be after so many rounds, but I was surprised that our Secretary of State is again choosing to do his best to undermine not only the law, but law created by a vote of the people. It’s a long and winding story, but the basic tale is that Secretary Gessler used [...]