| Subject: news of the day 6/23/04 |
| From: Rick Hasen |
| Date: 6/23/2004, 7:01 AM |
| To: election-law |
The Wall Street Journal offers Nader
Off to Rocky Start; As Deadlines Loom, Confusion, Limited Funds Dog
Campaign. A snippet:
If he had a fat campaign treasury -- say, $20 million or so -- Mr. Nader could hire enough paid signature gatherers and technical experts to easily clear the hurdles of the 35 states with tough ballot requirements, says Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at the University of Pennsylvania.
According to this press
release,
the Campaign Legal Center, Democracy 21, and the Center for Responsive
Politics filed a complaint with the FEC charging Americans Coming
Together (ACT), "a registered federal political committee, with
illegally spending soft money on its efforts to defeat President George
Bush. The violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA)
include ACT's improper calculation of the FEC allocation rules to
illegally spend more soft money on its voter mobilization activities
than the rules allow, ACT's illegal use of soft money to pay for its
direct mail fundraising communications that are required to be funded
with hard money and ACT's improper solicitation of funds."
The Sacramento Bee offers this
report.
There
certainly may be campaign finance issues associated with Michael
Moore's new film, "Fahrenheit 9/11" (I'll be writing something more
about this soon), but this New
York Post editorial is off the mark in considering the film a
possible "contribution" to Kerry.
The Hill offers this report. It
quotes Senator McCain as calling FEC Vice Chair Ellen Weintraub "an
egregious enabler of special interests."
Roll Call offers this
report
(paid subscription required), which begins: "In a major shift in
fundraising strategy, President Bush’s finance team has begun asking
wealthy Republicans to cut checks as large as $1 million to GOP state
parties in key election battlegrounds rather than steering their funds
to independent groups created in recent months to support Republican
candidates this fall."
"[J]udges,
like most other lawyers, are obsessive citers (a reflex designed to
conceal the subjective and unstable character of much legal
reasoning)." Judge Richard A. Posner, here.
I just received the following via email:
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Human Rights
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-- 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