[EL] ELB News and Commentary 12/14/15
Rick Hasen
rhasen at law.uci.edu
Mon Dec 14 09:38:01 PST 2015
“Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney, Sees Lessons in Albany Corruption
Trials” <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78317>
Posted onDecember 14, 2015 9:36 am
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78317>byRick Hasen
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
NYT
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/14/nyregion/preet-bharara-us-attorney-sees-lessons-in-albany-corruption-trials.html?ref=politics&_r=0>:
It would be, I think, irresponsible not to spend some time talking
about what those things, what those trials, have taught us, and what
those cases may mean for how everyone can get good government,” Mr.
Bharara said.
Mr. Bharara declined, as he has previously, to suggest specific
reforms or remedies or to say how any such measures would be carried
out.
But he said the fact that both convicted lawmakers —Sheldon Silver
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/sheldon_silver/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
the former Assembly speaker, and Dean G. Skelos, the former Senate
majority leader — chose to go to trial instead of pleading guilty in
a quick hearing allowed for a much more detailed airing of how their
crimes were committed.
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Posted inbribery <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=54>,chicanery
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>
“Emily’s List accuses Rep. Chris Van Hollen of going after its
donors” <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78315>
Posted onDecember 14, 2015 9:27 am
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78315>byRick Hasen
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
WaPo
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/emilys-list-accuses-rep-chris-van-hollen-of-going-after-its-donors/2015/12/13/1647bb64-a109-11e5-8728-1af6af208198_story.html>:
A powerful Democratic women’s group says Rep. Chris Van Hollen
(D-Md.) has been targeting its donors to peel away support from his
primary rival, Rep. Donna F. Edwards, for Maryland’s open Senate seat.
In a complaint to the Federal Election Commission filed Monday,
Emily’s List said that Van Hollen illegally used the group’s
financial disclosures to send out a fundraising solicitation to its
donors.
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Posted incampaign finance <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>,campaigns
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=59>
Trump Running as an Independent Candidate?
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78313>
Posted onDecember 14, 2015 9:21 am
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78313>byRick Hasen
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
Perhaps not
inOhio<http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2015/12/donald_trump_cant_run_as_indep.html>orTexas
<http://www.texastribune.org/2015/12/14/analysis-let-political-games-officially-begin/>.
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Posted inballot access <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=46>,campaigns
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=59>
“Yes to McConnell’s Rider” <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78311>
Posted onDecember 14, 2015 9:16 am
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78311>byRick Hasen
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
Ray La Raja
<http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/262828-yes-to-mcconnells-rider>:
If you are disgusted with dark money, the outsized influence of
billionaires, and power of uncompromising hard liners in Congress
who hold the nation hostage to their dogmas, you should like a
recent proposal by Senator Mitch McConnell )(R-Ky.).
His proposed rider to Senate omnibus legislation that would give
political parties the ability to spend more in support of candidates
might actually improve some of what ails the political system right now.
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Posted incampaign finance <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>,political
parties <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=25>,political polarization
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=68>
“How Trump Has Neutralized Super-PAC Cash”
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78309>
Posted onDecember 14, 2015 9:13 am
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78309>byRick Hasen
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
Bloomberg reports.
<http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-12-14/how-trump-has-neutralized-super-pac-cash?cmpid=BBD121415_POL>
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Posted incampaign finance <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>,campaigns
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=59>
“Republishing Romney” <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78307>
Posted onDecember 14, 2015 9:10 am
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78307>byRick Hasen
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
Bauer <http://www.moresoftmoneyhardlaw.com/2015/12/republishing-romney/>:
The Campaign Legal Centerwas pleased
<http://www.campaignlegalcenter.org/news/press-releases/clc-complaint-leads-fine-romney-super-pac-s-illegal-spending-2012>that
the Federal Election Commission had fined the independent Romney
Super PAC for republishing a Romney campaign video, but it was
disappointed that the penalty, $50,000, was low. Still, there
was/enforcement/, as my colleague Marc Eliaspointed out on Twitter
<https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/675445009328525314>.
It is a mixed triumph for the FEC. The agency got its settlement
and collected a fine but also agreed with the Romney Super PAC that
the law being applied had been unsettled and that PAC counsel had
adopted a reasonable legal position in the absence of a clear rule
or established interpretation…
Now the Romney Super PAC accepted the violation and paid the
penalty—score one for the Commission–and there is more than enough
room to question whether the Super PAC lawyers’ judgment was, in
fact, reasonable. The more important question is what the
Commission did with the case. It expressed disagreement with a
legal judgment it chose to characterize as reasonable, on a question
its rules and precedents did not clearly answer, and it added little
to the understanding of the republication rules.
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Posted incampaign finance <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>,campaigns
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=59>
“Inside Ben Carson’s small-dollar fundraising machine”
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78305>
Posted onDecember 14, 2015 9:08 am
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78305>byRick Hasen
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
CPI reports.
<http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/12/14/19002/inside-ben-carsons-small-dollar-fundraising-machine>
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Posted incampaign finance <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>,campaigns
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=59>
Ned Foley: Florida 2000 Was Not a Fluke
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78234>
Posted onDecember 13, 2015 8:00 pm
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78234>byRick Hasen
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
The following is the first of five guest posts byNed Foley
<http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/faculty/professor/edward-b-foley/>of Ohio
State, about his new bookBallot Battles: The History of Disputed
Elections in the United States
<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ballot-battles-9780190235277?cc=us&lang=en&>:
ballotbattles
<http://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/ballotbattles.jpeg>
Thanks, Rick, for the chance to highlight some themes from/Ballot
Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States/
<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ballot-battles-9780190235277?cc=us&lang=en&>(Oxford
University Press, 2016).
*Theme One:*The disputed presidential elections of 1876 and 2000 were
not isolated, aberrational events in America’s political system.
Instead, they are merely the two most prominent peaks in an entire range
of disputed elections running through American history from the Founding
Era to the present. Like geologists who can detect the plate tectonics
that underlie a mountain range, we can employ the historian’s tool to
see the structural forces that underlie the pattern of vote-counting
disputes that have erupted periodically in the past.
America’s difficulties in employing fair and predictable procedures to
count ballots in close elections are rooted in beliefs held—and choices
made—at the time of Founding. The Founders, as we know, abhorred
political parties and they hoped to design a constitutional system that,
by using separation of powers, would keep factionalism from developing
into organized political parties. Well, we know the plan did not work
out as intended.
But what is less well understood is that this misjudgment had specific
consequences in the context of a disputed statewide election, like that
for governor or a state’s presidential electors. The head-to-head
electoral competition between two organized political parties has
particular ferocity in a statewide ballot-counting fight. But the
Founders did not anticipate this particular problem, and thus did not
provide an institution to handle it. They knew about vote-counting
disputes in district-based elections for legislative seats, but those
were relatively contained affairs that could be handled within the
confines of each legislative chamber. It was an altogether different
thing when partisan control of the government’s chief executive turned
on the counting of a relatively few contested ballots. Before the
Revolution, America had no experience with that: colonial governors were
appointed, and the hereditary Monarch was hardly an elective office.
The Founders soon suffered from their oversight. One of important early
episodes in New York’s 1792 election for governor, when John Jay was
running as a Federalist to defeat the incumbent George Clinton, the
leader of the Jeffersonian party (the “Democratic Republicans”) in the
state. In addition to Jay himself, as well as Jefferson watching from
afar, other leading Founders—including Alexander Hamilton and James
Madison—either participated in or commented upon the vote-counting
controversy that erupted in this election. It was an altogether new
development that they were unprepared for, both intellectually and
institutionally. But it was not the only surprise of its type. In
1806, Massachusetts also suffered a disputed gubernatorial election that
seriously threatened civil strife in the state in the same way that New
York’s crisis a decade earlier had.
Don’t just take my word that the Founders were caught by surprise. They
said so themselves. Consider Madison, the foremost father of the federal
Constitution. In the 1820s, long after the Convention in Philadelphia
and after he himself had served as president, he admitted that the
system for presidential elections adopted in 1787 had been a mistake. A
topic addressed “in the latter stage of the Session,” Madison wrote to a
correspondent, “it was not exempt from a degree of the hurrying
influence produced by fatigue and impatience of all such Bodies.” In
particular, by the 1820s, having seen what had happened in New York and
Massachusetts and the like during the first few decades of the Republic,
Madison was concerned that the Constitution left the nascent nation
vulnerable to the calamity of a vote-counting dispute in a presidential
election. “In arranging the delicate task of appointing a President,”
Madison wrote in an 1826 letter, as little room as possible ought to be
left for abortive or controvertible results.”
But the nation didn’t, and still hasn’t, heeded Madison’s warning.
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Posted inelection administration
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>,The Voting Wars
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>
“Porn Industry Hit With Stiff Fine in California”
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78303>
Posted onDecember 13, 2015 7:12 pm
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78303>byRick Hasen
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy blogs
<https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/porn-industry-hit-stiff-fine-california>
(extra credit for the headline).
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Posted incampaign finance <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>
“Sanders abruptly pulls Internet ad saying Clinton is being funded
by ‘big money interests’” <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78301>
Posted onDecember 13, 2015 12:23 pm
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78301>byRick Hasen
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
WaPo reports.
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/12/sanders-abruptly-pulls-internet-ad-saying-clinton-is-being-funded-by-big-money-interests/>
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Posted incampaign finance <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>,campaigns
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=59>
“Weighing ‘one person, one vote’ and ‘no taxation without
representation'” <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78299>
Posted onDecember 13, 2015 12:18 pm
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78299>byRick Hasen
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
Reader reactions
<http://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-le-1212-saturday-supreme-court-voting-20151212-story.html>to
myrecent LAT oped
<http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1210-hasen-evenwel-voting-district-20151208-story.html>on
Evenwel.
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Posted inredistricting <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=6>,Supreme Court
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>
“Bush vs. Gore’s ironic legal legacy”
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78297>
Posted onDecember 13, 2015 12:13 pm
<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=78297>byRick Hasen
<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
Jamie Raskin
<http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1213-raskin-bush-v-gore-anniversary-20151213-story.html>has
written this LA Times oped:
Fifteen years after Bush vs. Gore, 15 years after the Supreme Court
intervened in a presidential election, a single sentence in the
majority opinion remains one of the great constitutional
brainteasers in our history. If we take the sentence at face value,
it’s nonsensical; if we ignore it, we might just be able to improve
our dysfunctional election system, at least modestly.
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Posted inBush v. Gore reflections
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=5>,election administration
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>,Supreme Court
<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>
--
Rick Hasen
Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science
UC Irvine School of Law
401 E. Peltason Dr., Suite 1000
Irvine, CA 92697-8000
949.824.3072 - office
949.824.0495 - fax
rhasen at law.uci.edu
http://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/hasen/
http://electionlawblog.org
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