[EL] ELB News and Commentary 7/2/18

Sun Jul 1 20:58:40 PDT 2018

“Supreme Court Defeat for Unions Upends a Liberal Money Base”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=99878>
Posted on July 1, 2018 8:41 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=99878> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

NYT:<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/01/business/economy/unions-funding-political.html>

The Supreme Court decision striking down<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/us/politics/supreme-court-unions-organized-labor.html> mandatory union fees for government workers was not only a blow to unions. It will also hit hard at a vast network of groups dedicated to advancing liberal policies and candidates.

Some of these groups work for immigrants and civil rights; others produce economic research; still others turn out voters or run ads in Democratic campaigns. Together, they have benefited from tens of millions of dollars a year from public-sector unions — funding now in jeopardy because of the prospective decline in union revenue.
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Posted in campaign finance<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>, campaigns<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=59>, Supreme Court<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>

“‘We have to pick a great one’: Inside Trump’s plan for a new Supreme Court justice”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=99876>
Posted on July 1, 2018 8:37 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=99876> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

WaPo:<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/we-have-to-pick-a-great-one-inside-trumps-plan-for-a-new-supreme-court-justice/2018/06/30/610dcd4e-7bb0-11e8-80be-6d32e182a3bc_story.html?utm_term=.34c38841c0bf>

“This president had a vision,” Leo said. “He did something entrepreneurial and different. He had a very clear sense of what he wanted, he spent a lot of time asking questions about [the late] Justice [Antonin] Scalia and Justice [Clarence] Thomas and other members of the court, and he got to know Justice Kennedy a little bit. I have been really impressed with how he conducted this process. He’s in control of it.”…

Trump has told advisers he is looking for three overarching attributes in a replacement for Kennedy. First, one adviser said, Trump insists upon an “extraordinarily well qualified” nominee with a superlative résumé. The president is especially drawn to contenders with name-brand degrees, such as from Ivy League universities such as Harvard or Yale. He also wants to see a portfolio of solid academic writing, though this adviser acknowledged that Trump does not care to read it; he simply wants to know it exists.

Secondly, Trump has said it is essential his nominee be “not weak,” meaning someone with independent judgment and the courage to buck “the political and social fashions of the day,” as the adviser put it.

Thirdly, Trump privately says he wants a nominee who will “interpret the Constitution the way the framers meant it to be,” according to the adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to relate a private discussion with the president.
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Posted in Supreme Court<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>

Today’s Must-Read: Adam Liptak’s “How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=99874>
Posted on July 1, 2018 8:22 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=99874> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

NYT:<https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/us/politics/first-amendment-conservatives-supreme-court.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region%C2%AEion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news>

On the final day of the Supreme Court term last week, Justice Elena Kagan sounded an alarm.

The court’s five conservative members, citing the First Amendment, had just dealt public unions a devastating blow<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/us/politics/supreme-court-unions-organized-labor.html>. The day before, the same majority had used the First Amendment to reject a California law<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/us/politics/supreme-court-crisis-pregnancy-center-abortion.html>requiring religiously oriented “crisis pregnancy centers” to provide women with information about abortion.

Conservatives, said Justice Kagan, who is part of the court’s four-member liberal wing, were “weaponizing the First Amendment.”

The two decisions were the latest in a stunning run of victories for a conservative agenda that has increasingly been built on the foundation of free speech. Conservative groups, borrowing and building on arguments developed by liberals, have used the First Amendment to justify unlimited campaign spending, discrimination against gay couples and attacks on the regulation of tobacco, pharmaceuticals and guns.
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Posted in campaign finance<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>, Supreme Court<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>

“Justice Kennedy May Soon Find Himself Disappointed And His Legacy Undermined”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=99872>
Posted on July 1, 2018 8:20 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=99872> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Nina Totenberg analysis<https://www.npr.org/2018/06/30/624918050/justice-kennedy-may-soon-find-himself-disappointed-and-his-legacy-undermined> for NPR.
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Posted in Supreme Court<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>

“Kennedy’s Retirement Could Threaten Efforts to End Partisan Gerrymandering”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=99870>
Posted on June 30, 2018 1:32 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=99870> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Michael Wines<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/us/kennedy-scotus-gerrymandering.html> for the NY Times:

For 14 years, as partisan gerrymanders across the country grew more extreme, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy came to symbolize hopes that the Supreme Court would eventually rein them in.

His retirement this week did not merely dampen those hopes. Experts said it also presented a potentially crippling threat to growing efforts by voting rights advocates and Democrats to halt gerrymanders by legal and political means….

But that likelihood, some said, is quite small. In hearing gerrymander challenges during the last term, Justice Roberts worried aloud about enmeshing the court in political matters.

“There’s a chance. It’s not zero,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a University of Chicago law professor who has helped lead a lawsuit challenging the makeup of the Wisconsin State Assembly<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/01/us/wisconsin-supreme-court-gerrymander.html>. “But I think our odds plummeted as a result of Kennedy’s retirement.”…

In 2015, the Supreme Court rejected a claim<https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-1314_3ea4.pdf> by Arizona’s Republican-led Legislature that the Constitution gave it sole authority over redistricting, and that a ballot initiative that shifted the task to a nonpartisan citizens commission was illegal. Justice Kennedy joined the court’s four liberals in the 5-4 ruling. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the dissent for the court’s conservative wing.

“That case really got Justice Roberts exercised,” said Richard L. Hasen, a law professor and election-law expert at the University of California-Irvine. “It was one of the more forceful dissents he has written.” In a court where hard-line conservatives are dominant, he and others said, the constitutionality of citizen redistricting commissions might well get a second and less favorable look.
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Posted in redistricting<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=6>, Supreme Court<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>

Today’s Must-Read: “Inside the White House’s Quiet Campaign to Create a Supreme Court Opening”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=99868>
Posted on June 29, 2018 8:27 am<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=99868> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

Adam Liptak and Maggie Haberman at the NYT with some scintillating details<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/us/politics/trump-anthony-kennedy-retirement.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news> of the effort to butter up Justice Kennedy.

Unfortunately it has led to some nutty conspiracy theories<https://twitter.com/rickhasen/status/1012684820067962881> about Justice Kennedy deciding cases to help Trump for corrupt reasons.

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Posted in Supreme Court<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=29>

“Will federal officials further regulate online political ads? Too soon to tell.”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=99866>
Posted on June 28, 2018 9:53 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=99866> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

CPI reports.<https://www.publicintegrity.org/2018/06/28/21908/fec-political-ads-online-russia-regulation-google-twitter-facebook>
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Posted in campaign finance<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10>, campaigns<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=59>, federal election commission<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=24>

“NAACP Sues To Throw Out Connecticut Legislature’s Map Over Prison Gerrymandering”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=99863>
Posted on June 28, 2018 4:05 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=99863> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

HuffPo:<https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/connecticut-prison-gerrymandering_us_5b354e92e4b08c3a8f68ce00?6nl>

The NAACP and a handful of voters filed a lawsuit<https://www.naacp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/NAACP-ComplaintFiled-DLFor062818-release.pdf> on Thursday to strike down the map for the Connecticut legislature before the 2020 election. The plaintiffs say that lawmakers are unconstitutionally drawing district lines when they count prisoners as part of the population of the place where they’re incarcerated.

Connecticut redraws its electoral districts every 10 years and uses the population data in each district to do so. When the state draws those new lines, it counts prisoners as part of the population where the prison is located.

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Posted in felon voting<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=66>, redistricting<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=6>

--
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
rhasen at law.uci.edu<mailto:rhasen at law.uci.edu>
http://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/hasen/
http://electionlawblog.org<http://electionlawblog.org/>

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