| Subject: news of the day 7/28/04 |
| From: Rick Hasen |
| Date: 7/28/2004, 7:58 AM |
| To: election-law |
The New York Times offers this report. You can find the group's press release here. Marty Lederman weighs in here on why there are reasons to believe the suit may well be rejected.
Let me offer another: the kind of challenge plaintiff is bringing
here is an "as applied" challenge to the blackout period. (The Supreme
Court upheld a facial challenge to that blackout period in the McConnell
case.) In my forthcoming
Penn Law Review article on McConnell,
I argue that the Supreme Court appears to have foreclosed such
as-applied challenges (a result I am not necessarily sure is a good
one).
Bob Bauer responds here. I am not convinced by Bob's distinctions. Why is it corporate speech when the NRA (a grassroots organization) speaks but it is individual speech when Michael Moore speaks? Moore, of course, is not funding ads for his movie himself. They are paid for by a foreign corporation.
There may be good reasons to exempt both (or neither) from the electioneering communications provisions. But I don't think the distinction Bob draws is persuasive.
UPDATE: A reader writes:
After all, it's not like the NRA exists for some completely
different
purpose, and it's resources have been hijacked to advance an agenda the
corporation's members wouldn't agree to. That's a fair description of
Moore's case! The NRA exists specifically to give it's members a voice
in
instances like this.It's not a hijacking, it's more of a charter
flight...
UPDATE 2: Bob posts here
what he characterizes as his "last word." He still does not grapple
with the fact that Moore's spending is being done by a corporation, and
a Canadian one at that.
The Center for Public Integrity has issued this
report on 527s.
-- 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