[EL] Attention fellow totalitarians...

Fri Apr 18 07:49:21 PDT 2014

As a newbie to the list I don't have personal knowledge to say much on Hasen v Adams, but _your_ attack on Christian is both laughable and casually slanderous. You make him out to be some sort of white supremacist, but then that's what the left in our bizarro world often calls people who are against racial preferences and for freedom of association.

Also, it's fine if you don't like True the Vote, but "essentially partisan organizations which pretend that they are not what they are" can be used to describe far more liberal organizations whose "mainstream" bona fides the media narrative doesn't question.

Finally, while I'm a classical liberal rather than conservative, it seems like your narrow definition of legal conservative -- someone who adheres to an absolute stare decisis -- would exclude Justice Thomas and many others (and would make conservatives into very convenient one-way ratchets for the progressive agenda, which to be fair is what many  conservatives themselves have done with their "judicial restraint" response to Warren-Court excesses and legislative overreaching).

Ilya Shapiro
Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies
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twitter.com/ishapiro<http://twitter.com/ishapiro>

On Apr 18, 2014, at 7:37 AM, "Marc Greidinger" <mpoweru4 at gmail.com<mailto:mpoweru4 at gmail.com>> wrote:

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<mailto: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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