This week, the Senate begins deliberations on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who if confirmed, would become the first Hispanic and only the third woman to serve on the high court. For campaign finance reform advocates across the nation, her nomination may be no less historic - perhaps a rare opportunity to seat a champion of clean elections on the Supreme Court. With the high court poised to review our campaign finance laws in September, Judge Sotomayor's record on and off the bench suggests that a Justice Sotomayor may emerge as a compelling voice of reason on the issue of campaign finance reform.

To begin with, for four years prior to her appointment to the U.S. District Court by President George Bush in 1992, Judge Sotomayor served on the New York City Campaign Finance Board, a nonpartisan agency that administers the city's campaign finance program. In 1996, co-authoring an article in the Suffolk University Law Review, Judge Sotomayor wrote,

Furthermore, in 2005, on the one instance when campaign finance reform entered her jurisdiction as a Court of Appeals judge, Sotomayor joined the majority opinion in effectively granting the court's blessing to Vermont's strict limits on campaign contributions.

Admittedly, Judge Sotomayor's substantial legal record is no ironclad guarantee that as a justice on the high court, she will be no less an ardent defender of campaign finance reform. One only need to be reminded that retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter, appointed to the court by the first President Bush for his conservative credentials, soon surprised even the court's keenest observers by consistently dissenting from his fellow appointees from the Reagan-Bush years.

If confirmed, we hope that Judge Sotomayor will continue to follow a commonsense interpretation of our nation's laws, recognizing that forging a stronger foundation for free speech in our democracy will require breaking the stranglehold of special interests on our leaders through campaign finance reform.

Since President Obama has taken office his administration and a congress controlled by Democrats have pursued and passed several major initiatives geared toward putting America back on track. Chief among these initiatives have been rescuing banks and financial firms whose impending demise put America on the precipice of a complete economic meltdown, passing a massive stimulus bill to slow and potentially stop the massive amounts of job losses, and starting to wind down the war in Iraq which has cost us dearly in blood, treasure, and international prestige. Most recently Obama and congress are pushing for reforms in healthcare, environmental and energy policy.

All that being said, Obama and Congress have yet to tackle the fundamental issue that created the catastrophe out of which we are now digging ourselves - an issue that Obama himself campaigned on: campaign finance reform.

Bill Moyers takes his renowned pen to Truthout and, while citing one of our recent reports, tears apart the notion that the reason for so much "compromise" in Washington on health care, financial regulation, and clean energy has to do with lively debate or a divide among the will of the people. It's not about compromise. It's not about what the public wants. It's about money - the golden ticket to "the select few who actually get it done."

When Congress passed the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act, "the select few" made sure it no longer contained the cramdown provision that would have allowed judges to readjust mortgages. The one provision that would have helped homeowners the most was removed in favor of an industry that pours hundreds of millions into political campaigns.
The list of injustices goes on, and they cite a couple other poignant ones in the column.

Our "Washington's Black Gold" report on climate cash, referenced by Moyers and co-author Michael Winship, is right over here.

Again, public broadcasting's elder statesman paints an unpretty but honest picture.

Crossposted at the Times Union Blog

We at Common Cause/NY are fed up with gridlock in the New York State Senate. The antics of our state senators have stalled important bills on campaign finance reform, ethics, stimulus oversight, and election reform - to name only some of the areas where important bills were left to hang - and blocked renewal of city and county authority to help the unemployed, run schools and collect sales tax. The Senate has wasted the tax dollars of 19 million New Yorkers and made Albany a national laughingstock.

"You were elected by the people to represent us. Gridlock does not represent us. GET TO WORK!" - S. A., Suffern, SD 38

That is why we've launched a campaign telling our state senators to Get Back to Work and Stick With It! The current stalemate is a symptom of a larger disease that paralyzes functional government year-in and year-out, one that is painfully obvious right now. Stick With It is one phase of the larger Empire State Project which will fight to ensure Albany doesn't return to "business as usual" when the stalemate ends. Our long-term goal is to identify and help initiate long-term structural changes to protect New Yorkers from such a deadlock ever happening again.

Change is in the air in Massachusetts -- just last week a sweeping ethics, lobbying, and campaign finance bill was signed into law. After years of advocating for these reforms, Common Cause's work has paid off in triplicate.

When a series of public corruption scandals shook the State House last year, Governor Deval Patrick assembled a task force that included a large Common Cause contingent--state director Pam Wilmot, former national president Scott Harshbarger, and state board member Peter Sturges. This task force then drafted legislation that was filed in January at the start of the legislature's two-year session.

"Reform before revenue" became a mantra in State House offices, and within months starting both houses had passed their own bills. Through a forceful lobbying, media and advocacy campaign, Common Cause, along with reformers in the State House, swayed the conference committee to adopt the strongest aspects within the house and senate versions.

When the compromise bill passed the week before last, Common Cause was acknowledged on the floor of the senate. When it was signed into law, Speaker Robert DeLeo publicly acknowledged Common Cause's significant part in moving this legislation.

A summary of the legislation, and a copy of the bill, can be found here.

There is only one solution to the state senate meltdown: the personal touch.

Each senator should pick one senator of the opposing party from a different part of the state from his or her own district and quietly and personally reach out to that senator. Make a phone call, send an email, have a mutual friend reach out - heck, even send a hand-written note. And then, meet in person. Quietly. Off-the-record, somewhere out of the way or behind closed doors. Air your grievances, try to understand the other's point of view - but stick with it, keep talking. Build the relationships that are necessary to break the deadlock, but are also necessary for effective legislating.

Governor Patterson is following the right approach, forcing the senators to stay in Albany. But, as the old adage says, "You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." Senators should break the tedium of their enforced stay in Albany to break out of the existing echo chambers that they seem trapped in.