[EL] Attention fellow totalitarians...

Fri Apr 18 04:36:14 PDT 2014

I am familiar with some of  Mr. Adams' work, and do not think of him as
conservative or libertarian. I think of him as an advocate for a right wing
faction within the Republican party via True the Vote and other similar
essentially partisan organizations which pretend that they are not what
they are.

One of the very positive features of this list-serve is that it is
overwhelmingly populated by people who would classify themselves as First
Amendment advocates. They include liberals who want to eliminate procedural
barriers to getting valid votes counted and libertarians who want to
further reduce campaign finance regulations.

I would think that a "conservative" perspective at this point would
embrace *Buckley
v. Valeo, Anderson v. Celebrese, Yick Woo, NAACP, *etc. These decisions
have proven essentially durable, and after a certain amount of time, it no
longer makes sense to talk about overturning them as "conservative."

The more active participants in this list serve often disagree, but there
is common ground for a dialogue built on principles that Congress and the
Supreme Court have laid down in the last 70 years.

Mr. Adams' position would return the US to a possibly imaginary, but in any
case idealized, pre-Voting Rights Act, pre-Civil Rights Act, pre-Warren
Court age in which "virtuous  voters" (read white, privileged, educated to
somebody else's standards, no brushes with the law, willing to jump through
irrelevant and unnecessary hoops, multi-generational US, land owning) are
the only ones get to participate in decisions about who rules them, and
when the US did not prevent those with money from anonymously buying
elections and the elected. In other words, well before the time when the
median voter was born. That position is more accurately described at this
point as "reactionary." Applied to the Internet/Fox News/C4 age, it is a
gateway to reinforcing the Oligarchic tendency in American politics found
in the Princeton study yesterday.

These views might be marginal almost to the point of frivilous except that
they are being vigorously resuscitated in right wing political discourse
through deliberate efforts. Doubtless this comes out of a perceived
political imperative by those with the most to lose to hold on to shrinking
electoral ground. But the underlying ideas are not particularly fact based
and usually intellectually dissatisfying. IMHO, that is why they are mostly
marginal on this listserve, even among those on the right of the dialogue.

Adams is one of those whose job has become advocating for resuscitation of
reactionary views that probably never were. He is frustrated because some
participants here are far more likely to be called on as experts in
election law and is fighting for credibility. He knows he cannot defend
himself in present company from a seat at this table, so he does not try,
and tries to discredit the table and the dialogue here generally. Perhaps
he will get a forum for himself this way because someone is worried about
the perception of "balance" somewhere. When political issues are at stake
sometimes one must reach very far into the extremes to find someone on the
other side for "balance."

Is it a bad thing that reactionary viewpoints are being ignored here
because the membership here finds them irrelevant? Speaking only for
myself, it is too easy for me to spend too much time in circular arguments
with people who are not open to different perspectives and who will neither
listen nor do the hard work that is sometimes necessary to really engage.
If someone wants to participate here in an engaging way, it has been my
observation that they are usually engaged. Obviously there is no conspiracy
to marginalize anyone. Some people do marginalize themselves through their
marginal views and a manner of expressing themselves from which ultimately
there is nowhere to go.

On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 5:18 PM, Jon Roland <jon.roland at constitution.org>wrote:

>  I commend and thank Rick Hasen for maintaining this Election Law
> listserv in a way that has attracted major players in this important area
> of public debate. Although he is clearly an advocate of more regulation
> restricting donations or expenditures, or requiring disclosures, he
> moderates lightly and thus has created a forum in which those of us who
> oppose such regulatory intervention can contribute our views. My position
> is that while rent-seeking in the political process is a serious problem,
> all such interventions are unconstitutional, whether or not the
> Constitution is wise on that point. I happen to think the Founders got it
> right, and would oppose any attempts to amend the First Amendment. I also
> hold that all the regulatory interventions I have seen seriously proposed
> are not just unconstitutional, but ineffective or counterproductive. We do
> need to find solutions to the public choice problem, but they are not to be
> found in such regulation. They are to be found in either changing the
> political culture so that people ignore the kinds of influences money can
> buy, or else replacing elections with some kind of sortition system where
> at least some steps in the selection are random. That method has been
> successfully used in several countries in the past, and it seems to be the
> only method anyone has found to do so.
>
> -- Jon
>
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