| Subject: news of the day 11/6/04 |
| From: Rick Hasen |
| Date: 11/6/2004, 2:27 PM |
| To: election-law |
When I first started blogging, I wrote a great deal about judicial nominations and filibusters. I have largely ignored this issue during the election season, but with the news of the Chief Justice's health looking increasingly discouraging, we will soon be in for a possible confirmation war over the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Much of the news concerns whether Republican Senator Arlen Specter will be the new chair of the judicary commitee. It seemed like a sure thing, until Specter made some remarks about the difficulty of confirming an anti-abortion candidate. See this New York Times report. Now some conservatives don't want him to head the committee, and there are suggestions of a strong conservative as the new Chief Justice. The Wall Street Journal suggested Miguel Estrada, and Howard Bashman has suggested Fifth Circuit judge Edith Jones for Chief Justice, which would surely be a controversial move given her stance on abortion.
Specter may actually provide the only hope of breaking some of the deadlock over judicial confirmations. If he is not chair, Larry Solum may well be right that we face a downward spiral over the process, which could well lead to a change in the Senate filibuster rules and a breakdown of work at the Senate.
I won't be sending my blog posts on confirmation issues to the
election law list because this is just not germane enough to the topic
of election law. You can find such posts periodically on the blog here.
See Party
Indepedent Spending Soars. From the press release:
One of the parties' major techniques was to spend money independently of their candidates in unlimited amounts. The Supreme Court reaffirmed the parties' right to do this when it overturned one of BCRA's provisions in the 2003 case of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission that otherwise upheld most of the new law. This spending by separate party staff is in addition to the limited money parties may spend in full coordination with candidates. All of the party money -- coordinated, independent and generic -- is funded by hard money raised under contribution limits specified in BCRA.
House Winners
Average $1 Million for First Time; Senate Winners Up 47%. From the
press release:
The increase in Senate fundraising was even more dramatic. The $6.5 million that the average winner raised was 47% more than the winners of 2002 and 57% more than the last time the same seats were up for election in 1998 (see Table 2).
Copley News Service offers this
report. See also Like
Clinging Chads, Kerry Faithful Hang On (Plain Dealer), The
Election Monitoring Circus Leaves Town (commentary by Peyton Knight
endorsing local control of elections); and Glitch
Found in Ohio Counting (New York Times).
The Washington Post offers this
report. See also A
Million Bucks Didn't Buy Much for Free-Spending Candidates and Election
Spending Soars Despite Law.
-- 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