Abuse of Power

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.

Recently, the Washington Post called Maryland the worst gerrymandered state in the nation. Azavea, an independent geospatial mapmaking firm, ranks Maryland as the least compact state in the nation.Why should you care that Maryland is dead last in this category? Well, compactness is a key measurement of a redistricted map.

On Wednesday night, Fox19 news in Ohio aired an investigative piece examining the influence of ALEC in that state. I was interviewed as part of the segment, which was based in part on Common Cause’s investigation of ALEC over the past 18 months. This story, parts of which were included in a front page New York Times story in April, demonstrates the lengths some legislators will go to please ALEC and its corporate financiers.

You’d think a public official whose job is to supervise free and fair elections would be focused on ensuring that every eligible voter has a meaningful chance to vote and that every vote is counted as cast. Sadly, in Ohio, you’d be wrong.
Jon Husted, Ohio’s secretary of state, is making it his business to gum up the machinery of democracy in the Buckeye state. He’s been fighting for months to limit access to early voting, which helps tens of thousands of Ohioans with disabilities, or jobs that keep them busy during normal voting hours, participate in elections.

It’s the first Monday in October, so the big news outlets and legal blogs were full over the weekend of stories and posts on the opening of the Supreme Court’s 2012-13 term.
The new term begins with the court still refusing to formally adopt for itself the ethical code it enforces at every other level of the federal judiciary. The Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges instructs judges to maintain their independence by acting “without fear or favor.” It tells judges to disqualify themselves from cases in which they or members of their family have a personal interest, to take care to obey laws requiring them to disclose their personal finances and to avoid any involvement in partisan politics, among other things.