[EL] CA's law requiring presidential candidates to disclose tax returns

[Tom@TomCares.com]

I’ve been finding it amusing how the real effect of this bill has been
masked.

The part about presidential candidates may well be struck down.

No one talks about the other thing this bill does - it requires CA
gubernatorial candidates to make 5 years of tax returns public, 3 months
before the primary. Of course, CA always attracts lots of gubernatorial
candidates - i.e. 27 in 2018; 135 in 2003.

Transparency on potential conflicts of interests is a good thing. However,
I’m not sure the disclosures that are already required are insufficient and
I can’t say I’m not concerned that the extra precision and details found in
tax returns will just make for good fodder about candidate’s personal
issues and distract attention away from policy and issues. Public attention
gets easily captured by personal issues, fading the line between political
journalism and reality television.


Tom Cares



On Wed, Jul 31, 2019 at 3:07 PM Sean Parnell <
sean at impactpolicymanagement.com> wrote:

> The California primary is irrelevant to the selection of delegates from
> California and who they vote for at the national convention. If, somehow,
> this isn’t struck down, and some protest candidate “wins” the California
> GOP primary instead of Trump, I expect the California state GOP convention
> will still send a delegation composed entirely of Trump-pledged delegates,
> and there’s nothing the state can do to prevent that.
>
>
>
> Sean Parnell
>
>
>
> *From:* Law-election <law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu> *On
> Behalf Of *Nate Persily
> *Sent:* Tuesday, July 30, 2019 9:31 PM
> *To:* Election Law <law-election at uci.edu>; Pildes, Rick <
> rick.pildes at nyu.edu>
> *Subject:* Re: [EL] CA's law requiring presidential candidates to
> disclose tax returns
>
>
>
> Here is the text of the bill that  was signed into law.
>
>
>
>
> https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200SB27
>
>
>
> It applies to presidential and gubernatorial primaries. For reasons Rick
> mentions, the constitutional issues are somewhat different for the
> different offices.   The regulation of presidential primaries implicates
> both the candidates’ and the parties’ (state and national) constitutional
> rights. Unless I read it wrong, the actual implications for the 2020
> Republican primary are  largely symbolic — that is, whether Trump’s name
> appears on the primary ballot in the state. Assuming the national
> Republican Party disagrees with this, they can do what the Democrats did
> with respect to Michigan and Florida in 2008: presumptively not include
> delegates from California (or more likely, simply have some procedure that
> ratifies a Trump-slate of delegates to the convention).  (If Trump had a
> serious challenger, it might be less purely symbolic  but the national
> party’s remedy would be the same and the state party might also have some
> options.)
>
>
>
> Leaving aside the implications for 2020, there are different claims (and
> applicable precedent) for the candidates, state party, and national party.
> I review some of them in this article:
>
> *Candidates v. Parties: The Constitutional Constraints on Primary Ballot
> Access Laws*, 88 Georgetown Law Journal2181 (2001)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 30, 2019 at 6:06 PM Pildes, Rick <rick.pildes at nyu.edu> wrote:
>
> I just posted this to the Election Law blog:
>
>
> The Central Issue in the Constitutional Challenge to CA’s New Law Denying
> Ballot Access to Presidential Candidates Unless They Disclose Their Tax
> Returns <https://electionlawblog.org/?p=106702>
>
> Posted on July 30, 2019 2:54 pm <https://electionlawblog.org/?p=106702> by
> Richard Pildes <https://electionlawblog.org/?author=7>
>
> The Supreme Court has long recognized that laws regulating candidate
> access to the ballot implicate the First Amendment and associational rights
> of *voters. *As a result, the Court has held unconstitutional various
> regulations that impose “undue burdens” on ballot access, including in the
> context of presidential primaries.
>
> Indeed, in the one case perhaps closest on point to this new California
> law, the Supreme Court — in an opinion by Justice Stevens — has held that
> when such laws involve the presidential election process, the courts must
> be particularly careful to scrutinize such laws closely. The reasons,
> according to Justice Stevens for the Court in *Anderson v. Celebrezze, *460
> US 780 (1983), are these:
>
> Furthermore, in the context of a Presidential election, state-imposed
> restrictions implicate a uniquely important national interest. For the
> President and the Vice President of the United States are the only elected
> officials who represent all the voters in the Nation. Moreover, the impact
> of the votes cast in each State is affected by the votes cast for the
> various candidates in other States. Thus in a Presidential election a
> State’s enforcement of more stringent ballot access requirements, including
> filing deadlines, has an impact beyond its own borders.Similarly, the State
> has a less important interest in regulating Presidential elections than
> statewide or local elections, because the outcome of the former will be
> largely determined by voters beyond the State’s boundaries. This Court,
> striking down a state statute unduly restricting the choices made by a
> major party’s Presidential nominating convention, observed that such
> conventions serve “the pervasive national interest in the selection of
> candidates for national office, and this national interest is greater than
> any interest of an individual State.” *Cousins* v. *Wigoda,* 419 U. S.
> 477, 490 (1975)
> <https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=14828795262297953140&hl=en&as_sdt=6,33&as_vis=1>.
>
>
> There are no bright-line doctrinal rules here. The Court will weigh the
> “character and magnitude” of the burden the law imposes against CA’s
> legitimate justifications for it. But that process of analysis will include
> significant consideration of the issues that *Anderson *identified in
> striking down the Ohio ballot access law at issue there.
>
>
>
>
>
> Best,
>
> Rick
>
>
>
> Richard H. Pildes
>
> Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law
>
> NYU School of Law
>
> 40 Washington Square So.
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/40+Washington+Square+So.+%0D%0A+NYC,+NY+10014?entry=gmail&source=g>
>
> NYC, NY 10014
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/40+Washington+Square+So.+%0D%0A+NYC,+NY+10014?entry=gmail&source=g>
>
> 212 998-6377
>
>
>
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> --
>
> ----------------
>
> Nate Persily
>
> James B. McClatchy Professor of Law
> Stanford Law School
> 559 Nathan Abbott Way
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/559+Nathan+Abbott+Way+Stanford,+CA+94305-8610?entry=gmail&source=g>
> Stanford, CA 94305-8610
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/559+Nathan+Abbott+Way+Stanford,+CA+94305-8610?entry=gmail&source=g>
> (917) 570-3223
> npersily at stanford.edu
>
> www.persily.com
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