Common Cause and the League of Women Voters have long insisted they are fiercely nonpartisan and just want good government.  Right!

Both groups have blown that cover.  They are standing aside while California Governor Gavin Newsom pushes a brazen gerrymander attempt to elect more Democrats to Congress and override the voter-approved law requiring an independent commission to draw the lines in the Golden State.

Politico reports that in August the executive director of Common Cause laid out plans to fight Newsom’s gerrymander effort in California as well as a similar GOP move in Texas. He pledged to fund a “full-scale campaign to defeat a gerrymandering ballot initiative.”

But Common Cause’s national leadership has now announced they won’t oppose the ballot measure, even though its local staff in California found the Newsom plan was a naked political power play.

Former state Sen. Sam Blakeslee, a former member of the California Common Cause board, complains that the group was “co-opted by a political machine” and this “would damage its reputation and credibility for the long-term, which in itself is a threat to democracy.”

The sad lesson from all of this is that “good government” groups like Common Cause and the League of Women Voters aren’t friends of political reform. They consistently oppose popular ideas such as term limits and requiring voter ID at the polls.  And when enough pressure from the Progressive Industrial Complex is applied, even the good ideas they support can be subverted.