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If anyone from Common Cause would like to respond to this, we do allow a 'Right to Respond' on the front page.
I'm going to follow on Mark Schmitt and Atrios in their reasonable criticisms of Common Cause. I got this disgusting invitation from the group a few weeks ago.
Yes, that's former Congressman Jim Leach, Republican, who voted for Republican Majority Leader Tom Delay repeatedly (and chaired Whitewater hearings and voted for Clinton's impeachment) before being voted out of office in 2006. He's now the Chair of Common Cause, the group that sought to regulate blogs a few years ago under FEC law, potentially as political committees. That's who Common Cause chose as their chair. That's simply disgusting and dishonorable and they should be ashamed of themselves.
If you want to point to one single rationale for Common Cause's existence, it's the removal of the improper influence of money from the political system. So that group's failure to do anything about McCain's open lawbreaking around public financing is a symbolic measure of just how badly this group has failed. Not only has Common Cause, run by a group of DC insiders who think of themselves as liberals but operate in fact as status quo concern trolls, not removed the improper influence of money from politics, but the group has actually been a critical moderate washcloth for John McCain, helping him evade responsibility for the Keating 5 scandal, and now helping him eviscerate campaign finance law law by remaining silent during this latest ridiculous episode.
Common Cause needs to go away or completely overhaul its board and strategy. Perhaps an overhaul makes sense, as there is some residual value in the brand and there are some good people working there. Still, when your goal as an organization is to deal with corruption and you choose as your chair a Republican who voted for Tom Delay in the name of some sort of fabled bipartisanship, your group is a failure.
On a larger movement level, Common Cause has a basic theory about politics that has been explicitly proved wrong at every turn. They believe that placing restrictions on the flow of money into politics is a strategy to end corruption, and yet since their foundation in the early 1970s, the number of lobbyists has radically increased and the influence of money has grown by leaps and bounds regardless and sometimes because of the restrictions the group put in place. As a corollary, the group does not believe in politics. When I dealt with Donna Edwards and Al Wynn in 2006 and a stolen primary election, Common Cause and its vaunted electoral protection program was nowhere to be found. They are losers, they act like losers, and they deserve scorn until they stop acting that way.
It's other groups, like Public Knowledge, Actblue, Color of Change, Moveon, and Free Press, who have taken up the mantle of Common Cause and embarked on a different route to removing the improper influence of money from politics. And that is to empower the public with open systems and tools for making changes at the ballot box. As long as the public tolerates corruption, it will continue. And like it or not, and Common Cause clearly doesn't, the Republican Party is built on the premise that corruption and bad faith are worth voting for, and the Democratic Party is built on the opposite premise. And so the public has a clear choice at the ballot box, and good for that. We can win that fight by persuading people to vote for their values and by organizing.
And so I wish Republican Jim Leach, Common Cause, and the rest of the antipartisan concern troll community well in their quest to restrict the behavior of involved citizens in the political process and to whitewash the lawbreaking of the current Republican Party leader. I'm sure that's a route to success.
UPDATE: I'll note this is systemic. When Republican Congressional candidates break FEC law - for instance when Lieberman spent $150K in petty cash in the last few days before the election - Common Cause was nowhere to be found. Losers.
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