Common Cause’s Scruples
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Maybe it’s impolite to gloat over the innocent mistakes of others, but the self-righteous good-government types at Common Cause are just asking for it. Roll Call, a newspaper covering Capitol Hill, reported Monday that the advocacy group filed a semiannual lobbying disclosure form six months late. Mary Boyle, a spokeswoman for the group, told the Sun that in the midst of personnel changes, the report “slipped through the cracks” when the people who would ordinarily have filed it moved out of their jobs.
Since hardly anyone understands such disclosure rules, it’s plausible that only a handful of staffers would be up on the necessary paperwork. Plausible, but eyebrow-raising since Common Cause lobbies so vigorously for ever stricter political regulation. The gaffe would be more forgivable if the organization itself were more forgiving of others. Instead, some of the group’s state affiliates have been happy to attack other late filers in the past.
In March 2003, a legislator in Texas filed his campaign-finance papers late. Susan Woodford, executive director of Common Cause of Texas, chided what she called the “arrogance” of the state representative, Ronald Wilson. After Californians voted on a contentious energy-related ballot initiative in 2002, lobbyists for the power industry disclosed that they had failed to list $800,000 in contributions from power company PG&E, an error they rectified three weeks after the deadline. Charles Marsteller, at that time a former coordinator for Common Cause’s San Francisco affiliate, filed a formal complaint. Both Mr. Wilson and the California lobbyists said their mistakes had been innocent oversights.
Not that innocence would make much of a difference to a group that was led for three years by Scott Harshbarger, who made his name as a Massachusetts prosecutor by convicting Gerald Amirault on bizarre child sex abuse charges in 1984. Other than its tardiness, there don’t appear to be any surprises or irregularities in the substance of Common Cause’s filing. And the group is free to lobby for stricter campaign-finance and lobbying regulations and then to denounce violators. But such scruples demand scrupulous adherence to its own principles. If Common Cause can’t manage that, perhaps it should reconsider the wisdom of the ideas it advocates.