| Subject: news of the day 1/6/04 |
| From: Rick Hasen |
| Date: 1/6/2004, 7:31 AM |
| To: election-law |
The Orlando Sentinel offers this
report. Link via Electionline.org.
BNA
reports that the Federal Election Commission is set to rule tomorrow on
an important advisory opinion concerning the permissible
election-related activities of section 527 organizations----groups that
have become more important since the Supreme Court upheld BCRA's
restrictions on soft money raising and spending by political parties.
Alan Ehrenhalt offers this essay in Governing magazine, which begins: "Fifty-eight years ago, Justice Felix Frankfurter told his brethren to stay out of the business of drawing political maps. “Courts ought not to enter this political thicket,” Frankfurter warned in Colegrove v. Green. “The fulfillment of this duty cannot be judicially enforced.” Initially, they listened to him. The U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Colegrove’s assertion that Illinois congressional districts were grossly unequal in population, were based on obsolete census data and were therefore unconstitutional. Your argument is reasonable, the court in effect said, but we don’t go there." The article interestingly both praises Felix Frankfurter's calls for courts to stay out of the political thicket and argues "Redrawing lines in the middle of the decade, as happened recently in Texas and Colorado, is an extra-legal form of mischief that might actually be curable by judicial decree."
Thanks to Ed Feigenbaum for the pointer.-- Rick Hasen Professor of Law and William M. Rains Fellow Loyola Law School 919 South Albany Street Los Angeles, CA 90015-1211 (213)736-1466 (213)380-3769 - fax rick.hasen@lls.edu http://www.lls.edu/academics/faculty/hasen.html http://electionlawblog.org